


Emergency Contact

by feldman



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 7-Elevens, Age Regression/De-Aging, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Horny Teenagers, Jarvis (Iron Man movies) Lives, M/M, Multi, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 00:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11543391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman
Summary: Natasha, Nick and Tony go on a mission to rescue Bruce after AoU, and are de-aged to adolescence.  A story of four genius misfit loners sticking it to The Man and occasionally to each other, settling scores, and finding themselves. The real adventure is the friends they make along the way. And the evil scientists. And the thugs with tasers. And also that shark.





	1. Pepper to the Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thassalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/gifts).



> [There is also a soundtrack.](http://handypolymath.tumblr.com/post/162806823044/emergency-contact)

### Pepper to the Rescue

“We’re in a bunker,” Tony’s voice sounds scratchy, oddly high.

“Oh my god, Tony, are you alright?” Relief hits Pepper like the ground at terminal velocity. It's the middle of the night. It's 337 hours after their quinjet was found crash-landed and empty in the Cascade mountains.

”It’d be great if someone could come get us.” Background voices, clipped with urgency. “I have coordinates.”

She reaches for the tablet on the side table and keys open JARVIS to run a trace and record on the line. Tony sounds distracted, thready. Injured, probably. “Are the other two with you?”

The pause is so long Pepper can't breathe.

Maybe she's hallucinating from lack of sleep, or maybe this instance of JARVIS is not as stable as Tony had claimed. Hoped. He’d waited until Bruce had left to even begin tinkering with reboots, and she suspects it was loneliness that had driven him to try restoring the corrupted and transformed AI with an older offline backup. Then JARVIS had detected a distress signal that was undoubtedly Bruce, but had stopped before they could triangulate more than the general area. Tony had left him running to keep watch.

She tightens her grip, because she thought she saw Tony’s contact info on the screen, but now she can't make herself pull the phone away from her ear to check.

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” Tony says finally. “Maybe sit down? If, you know, you aren’t already.”

~*~

Maria picks them up a few valleys southwest from the jet wreckage, which is the frustrating icing on this whole cake because they'd scanned these forests and abandoned lumber roads six ways from Sunday.

The other surprise is that there are _four_ teenagers in cheap Walmart hoodies and jeans standing around their unconscious hostage. The hostage turns out to be one of the doctors on the erstwhile project that had abducted and experimented on them. The other personnel are decidedly dead. The teenagers are immediately recognizable, and not just by the fact that the wreckage of the compound tucked into the side of the wooded mountain behind them is still smoldering.

They don't seem to recognize Maria.

They are sullen and cagey and shifty...and then there’s Nick. He’s actually a little shorter than his adult self, but Director Fury's muscle mass and gravitas made him more wall-like, so Nick at seventeen looks taller because he's all lengths and beautiful bone structure. Maria’s squad fans out to secure the compound, and she holsters her weapon and warily introduces herself.

“I’m Deputy Director Hill of the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division. If you’ll come with me, I can take you to safety.”

Nick gives her a dry and baleful expression.

Maria bites her cheek so she doesn’t reflexively tack on a _Sir_. Instead she adds, “Pepper Potts sent me,” and that gets a guarded response.

“Yeah, so apparently she’s one hell of an emergency contact.” The shortest kid’s a pipsqueak version of Stark, his voice dropped close to the right pitch but with none of the smokiness. Maria figures it’s the lack of scotch. He’s wearing two hoodies, and his nervy bouncing energy doesn't quite hide his full body shiver.

Then there’s Banner, who's been off the radar a lot longer than two weeks. He's bare-armed in a sweaty t-shirt, breathing hard like a scrawny bull about to charge, flecked with blood and sporting the yellow remains of a hell of a shiner. He's holding an elbow to brace that shoulder, tilted away to hide the injury from her and her team. Typical.

Romanoff looks like she’s being picked up after gymnastics practice, rosy-cheeked and hair in a smooth ponytail, except for the shiv in her hand and the clear evidence that she’s wiped it clean several times on the leg of her jeans. Different shades of blood clash with each other, and with her bright hair.

“Well come on, then,” Maria waves them back toward the jet where the medic team awaits.

~*~

Pepper dictates to her assistant Keej as she walks. “We’ll need clothes in a range of sizes, jeans and t-shirts mostly. Boots, tennis shoes, pajamas. Bathrobes, swimsuits, new sheets--all the linens. Toothpaste, deodorant, soap. Razors, maybe? Shampoo, tampons…”

Jim breaks in, “Condoms.”

Pepper stops short and shoots him a look.

“Pep, I knew sixteen year old Tony Stark. Get condoms. Maybe some rubber gloves--no, strike that.” Jim lays an earnest hand on her arm, “ _Definitely_ get the gloves too.”

Pepper turns on her heel and stalks onto the tarmac. Jim calls after her about lube and she pinches the bridge of her nose and waves a hand for Keej to add it to the list.

The beach house in Malibu is one of Pepper’s most closely guarded secrets. Which means that even SHIELD didn’t know its exact location, though it’s mostly hidden in plain sight. Big on privacy, not so much on housewares. They haven’t come up with a better place for the them to stay until this wears off.

If it wears off.

So she’s trying to stock it for a bunch of teenage superheroes whom she knows and yet doesn’t. Or at least that’s the assumption, from the intel they’ve been given.

She nods at Jim, and he follows her to the SI private plane. She had a meeting in California anyway, but she’s not sure how she’s going to get through an afternoon of talking logistics and fiscal projections when all she can think of is who will be waiting for her in that secluded house at the edge of the ocean.

~*~

Steve can see the people they will become and it’s eerie, as if they’re resolving into those adults like layers of clay added over a wire armature.

Tony’s pacing in the corner. He’s absolutely Tony Stark, even without the goatee, antsy and bristling with energy. His hair sticks up wildly, and he’s shorter than Bruce, somehow.

Nat is too thin and small, like she still has to grow an inch or three in every direction, though her cheeks are round and soft. Her wrists are so delicate it gives Steve a nostalgic sympathetic ache. Her features are composed, mouth pursed softly, ankles crossed. Deceptively prim. She wears leggings and a SHIELD jacket with pushed up sleeves that’s several sizes too big. Her feet are bare.

Bruce’s hair is shaggy and completely dark. He’s hunched over his knees. He looks embarrassed by the sling on his arm and the ice pack taped to his shoulder.

“You need to find him some glasses.”

Nat has no trace of an accent. Steve’s not sure why he expected one, come to think. “Yeah,” he stutters, “Of course.”

“He squints,” she explains, ignoring the hard look Bruce gives her, like she's told a secret.

Nick is the biggest surprise. Face smooth, cheekbones hollow, full head of hair and two good eyes. He’s a big, slim, good-looking kid with the most penetrating gaze Steve’s encountered in decades, like he sees through all of the bullshit, and is diagnosing it as he goes.

Steve steps forward, but it's Nick who gathers everyone's attention with his eyes and then sends it toward Steve with a flick of his chin.

“Hi,” he nods to the motley assembly, “my name is Steve Rogers, and--”

“Damn, son,” Tony brays, “your parents must have _hated_ you.”

~*~

Helen Cho blinks up into the spotless vault of azure for long moments after Thor leaves. Pepper finally shoos her back into the house, determined to get some satisfaction out of this meeting.

She'd hoped Thor would be able to help, given some of the strange items found in the remains of the research facility, but he wouldn’t even hazard any advice. Instead he'd flown off to consult with, quote, ‘scientists and magicians’, unquote.

Literally flown off, which is something Pepper really should be used to by now considering her partner, but it had startled her. She heads to the kitchen because that is where she keeps her liquor, like a normal person who doesn't need a living room shrine for it.

Pepper pours a few fingers of silver tequila for herself and for Helen.

“I’m not good with children,” Helen stops wringing her hands to take a sip, “they make me nervous. They don’t much like me.”

Pepper breathes tequila fragrance out of her nose. “Helen, you have two kids.”

“Clearly that’s different--”

“Two exceedingly brilliant kids, and I can assure you, that’s what I now have _a house full of_. They’re teenagers, they’re not…” Pepper waves a hand, struck with the realization she needs to lock up the booze, god this is a nightmare. She starts pulling down bottles, and rallies back to the topic. “Helen, we just need someone to make sure they’re okay. And we don’t have anyone else we all trust to...examine them. Compare their basic DNA, see if there’s any…anything wrong”

Helen knocks back the rest of her shot. “Aside from the blatantly obvious, you mean?”

Pepper sighs.

Sixteen year old Tony Stark is sleeping in her bed because the goddamned beach house is not actually designed for a crowd of kids and superheroes. She'd thought that giving him the master bedroom would make him feel comfortable, but it just makes her feel creepy.

Equally creepy is the fact that Natasha is clearly not sleeping in her guest room, even though her things are in there. Nat. She politely insists on being called Nat.

Also, the condoms keep disappearing.

“The thing is,” Helen gives an overly dramatic sigh, “if it’s science, if it’s fixable, you want a molecular biologist. I’m a geneticist.”

Pepper presses her thumb into an upper corner of her eye socket. “Can you just look them over, take some blood, tell us what you think?”

Helen must see the desperation on her face, because despite not being a particularly tactile person, she puts a gentle hand on Pepper’s wrist.

~*~

When Jim realizes Nat's determined to tag along to the optometrist with Bruce, he drafts the first responsible adult he comes across. He's not gonna be outnumbered.

Wilson insists on not only bringing his sandwich, but circling back to the kitchen to make a couple more for the...kids.

And yeah, he's gonna have to vacuum the crumbs out of his car, but Jim will admit the faces in his rear view mirror are less sullen with full bellies. There's still a weird vibe, though, Nat at the boy's elbow and scoping out their surroundings like secret service, Bruce tripping over the girl to give her space but keep her in sight.

She reads out the questions on the medical history form so he doesn't have to squint them out. He's trying to crack his knuckles about every ninety seconds, and she finally gives him the pen and clipboard to fiddle with like a small mercy.

Wilson chats up the clerk, and the optometrist in turn when they all shuffle into the exam room with Bruce.

This is when Jim hears the cover story Wilson's spun from a handful of dropped details; fellow warriors are family, and you take care of family, and maybe their dads didn't make it through for them, but we're here, we care.

None of it's wrong, and it answers a lot of questions before they're even asked, like why Jim's paying cash for this white boy's glasses. But at some point in the hour it took to get the kids ice cream while they ground lenses, the staff started assuming he and Wilson were a couple.

Nat's still nibbling her cone as she watches them bend the temples to fit Bruce's head. His ears are red, and not from the warm plastic.

“This is my superhero lifestyle,” Jim murmurs just loud enough for Wilson to hear, “chaperoning horny geeky white teens to the mall with my fake boyfriend.”

“Stay tuned for more adventures of…” Wilson flashes dimples saucy enough to give Tony a run for his money, “Sugar Daddy and Uncle Sam!”

~*~

“Hey, mom! Mmmmooooom!”

Laura strides to the window and twitches the curtain half an inch. In the moment it takes her to get there, she’s parsed the emotional content of Coop’s shout (excited, no pain or fear, slight anxiety), plotted out an escape route past the nearest weapons cache (holler out the hide signal, hit the palm lock on the fake laundry chute in the hall, scoop up Nate, gather the kids), and sent a silent prayer up that Clint is safe in whatever deep cover hole he’s in.

“Mom!” Lila’s bellow is clear and piercing, “There’s a Viking on the porch!”

Laura blows out her breath in a stream of pure profanity. She’s kind of over the whole alien Viking thing, seeing as he couldn’t even stay for dinner that one time he did visit, but then Thor follow’s Lila’s gaze up, squinting past the sunshine and the curtain, and the look on his face is like a punch in the stomach.

She pauses at the weapons cache but doesn’t open the lock. She swings Nate onto her hip along with the puffy cloth book he’s chewing on.

Lila and Coop flank Thor Odinson on the threshold of her home. He’s in jeans and a plain t-shirt, but he still looks like a Viking around the edges.

“Come in, come in,” she says.

Thor methodically wipes his hobnail boots on a mat she’d braided from strips of old clothes, for the first apartment she’d shared with Clint years ago, and he carefully moves Cooper’s outgrown raincoat from the hook before he hangs up his hammer.

“Laura Barton, I come with news of your next of kin--”

Her mind whirls through dread for Clint and hot anger that Maria doesn’t have the decency to--

“--and my oath mate, The Widow.”

She shoos the older two to finish their outside chores where she can keep an eye on them through the windows, shifts the laundry basket out of the pack and play, and deposits Nate in the middle of a mess of toys. “Okay, go ahead.”

“I am constrained in the details I am free to share, but as Clint cannot be contacted until his mission is complete, I insisted that it was the right thing to tell the rest of her family. Natasha has...taken ill during a mission. We are trying to restore everyone who was affected to their right selves, but it is slow-going.”

“Right selves? Is Clint okay? No,” Laura replays his words, “You said as much. What happened? Who else is hurt? Tell me everything you can. Shit.” She takes a step toward the kitchen, backtracks her mind, “Can I offer you something to drink? I’ve got coffee from this morning, or--”

“Please, do not trouble yourself, it is I who should offer assistance,” Thor lays a hand on her arm, and it’s warm, and the span on his palm reaches from her shoulder to her elbow, “I will tell you everything I know.”

He does, and the sight of him puttering in her kitchen fixing her a cup of coffee is hypnotic, but not as surreal as the tale he spins, or the photos he shows her on the Stark phone he pulls from his back pocket.

She scrolls back and forth through the pictures, sipping burnt coffee with too much sugar and shaking her head. Nat...and _Nick_ …they all look so closed off and vulnerable, awkwardly shoved partway back to childhood. She can’t imagine how scared they must be, mixed up in their own histories and trying to understand their present.

There’s a sludge of undissolved sugar in the dregs of her cup, but she lets Thor pour more coffee in and slip it into the microwave. “I need to talk to Maria,” she says, “can you watch the kids while I call her privately?”

“The children?” Thor yanks and nearly wrenches off the microwave door, then hunches his shoulders with chagrin and closes it delicately. It’s a big farmhouse kitchen, meant to be a work space, and he still makes it look cramped. “You wish me to watch over your tiny ones?”

“Yeah, Lila’s been clamoring to watch her favorite movie for the hundredth time, but it’s been too nice not to kick them outside instead.” Laura leads him into the den and flips through the dvd binder for _The Mummy_. “Cooper’ll probably read or draw, and Nate’s super chill now that the latest batch of teeth has come through; you’ll be fine.”

"I wish to help, but...”

“You'll be fine,” Laura assures him. She's going over conversions she's had over the years with Natasha, the steps she knows her friend took to shake off the legacy of her childhood, at the same time slipping the disc into the player, musing that while blonds with biceps are her jam this one's way too earnest, weighing how much intel to give Maria, and heading to the front door.

“Are you certain there isn't...a more arduous householding chore I could complete in your husband's stead? Do you have sufficient firewood?” Thor follows her like a huge puppy. “I mean no disrespect, but my strength is mighty--"

“I have information Maria needs to know. It will make it safer for Nat, for everyone.” Laura slugs the coffee back and throws open the sash of the window over the sink, shouting into the yard, “Hey Lila, Thor said he wants to hang out. He likes scientists and adventure, why don’t you show him your movie with Evie?”

~*~

Bruce comes to Pepper in the kitchen in the morning. The glasses suit his face, though his features haven’t caught up to him yet, still a bit raw and wide. He moves like he’s not sure what’s in front of him, spare shoulders jutting like buttresses over narrow hips, too thin through the chest. Knobby wrists, but stubble on his jaw.

She’s seen adult Bruce first thing in the morning a hundred times, scruffy and sleepy and blurry-eyed. Kind but not verbal, making tea, or nodding at Tony in that way he had of conveying he was listening without agreeing, or pretending to guard his toast from Natasha as if he didn't butter it expressly for her.

It has, in fact, been a solid eight months since Pepper’s seen him. Looking at this kid instead is the oddest sort of double vision, his sore arm pressed to his body and a determined look on his face

She wants to put her arm around him. She knows it's the last thing she should even attempt.

“Can I get you something…?” She tries to swallow the false brightness that steals over her when confronted with any of the kids. She wants to sound normal but it keeps coming out like a tv mom on speed. “Did you want breakfast? Tea?”

“No,” he says. “I mean we ate already. I ate. Tony snacked and drank a pot of coffee.” He pauses, trudging up manners from some deep recess, “No, thank you.”

All of them are like dealing with stray cats, but Bruce is the most skittish.

“I, uh,” he scrubs the back of his neck with his good hand, and it's such a familiar gesture that she finds it hard to breathe for a few seconds.

Sometimes when she's making arrangements for them, access to books and entertainment, things to occupy them or possibly jog their memories, tools and equipment for their nondestructive interests, reviewing the schedule of Avengers and agents rotating through her house to keep an eye on them, she forgets that these aren’t...her cousin's kids on a summer visit, aren’t just a weird experiment, or a funny anecdote. These are her friends. These are people who are being, effectively, tortured. The people she loves are inside these frail, damaged children.

“Please don’t cry,” Bruce says suddenly with real fear, real anguish. “I’m sorry, I’ll come back later, I didn’t mean…”

“Bruce,” she says gently, pushing her cup of coffee away, pushing her own reaction aside. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And you clearly want something. What can I do for you? To help?”

He eyes her dubiously, but finds his resolve, and she knows as he draws breath to ask that the favor won’t be for him. He seems incapable of asking for things for himself.

“Nat needs the right shoes,” he says. “For the floor, so she can dance. Um, ballet. Doing stuff,” his hand rolls in adult Bruce's explanatory gesture and the next words tumble out, “movement, like martial art or dance, it helps clear her head when she's troubled.” In a split second there's an expression of confusion, then anger, then pain and stubborn resolve.

Sam had warned that memory was a tricky damned thing, and this isn't the first time one of them has reacted or struggled with recollection they can't fully grasp. Jim calls them glitches, and the adults have followed his lead in not drawing attention to them unless the kids bring it up. Bruce's blank face is a sullen mouth and big wary eyes, while Nick favors a challenging stare, Tony lapses into free associative glossolalia, and Nat offers the bland static smile of a teen on a Target sale flyer.

She doesn't wonder why Nat didn’t ask; if Bruce isn’t capable of making personal requests, this version of Natasha definitely wouldn’t. 

“Slippers,” she clarifies, “ballet slippers.” Pepper took ballet class as a girl. She’d lacked the talent and the interest, but the discipline had never been a problem.

He shrugs. She takes it as a yes.

~*~

“The water’s fine,” Tony smirks at Nat, holding the surfboard at a jaunty angle like an erection, but he’s not calling attention to it, which is frankly a more subtle move than many of the men she’s met three or four times his age.

She nods, acknowledging the callback to the research cell, “So no barfing this time.”

He crosses his heart.

Something lurches in her own chest at that gesture.

It can catch one unaware when working deep cover in another language; the emotional words are different, and they can slip through the barriers erected in one’s native tongue. Nat squares her shoulders. It’s almost magical the way her system has been inured to _drosh_ , or shivers...and yet she still can get _the willies_.

“Come on, I’ll show you how.” Tony circles his hand around her wrist.

She lets him, just like she lets him pull her into his bed to sleep at night. He's not the only one having nightmares. He’s just the only one who’s admitted to it so far.

Nat normally only sleeps deeply when she's alone, and she keeps trying for that familiar dreamless unconsciousness and failing.

Ever since the cell, she only gets there after she's eased Tony down into sleep first, or if she knows one of them is on watch. And failure is not the fitful doze of being keyed up on a mission--she falls asleep either way, but without that soothing she's sucked into endless vivid scenes she doesn't understand, oversaturated with brutal emotion that lingers the next day like an intrusive thought.

~*~

“They look like drowned rats,” Steve says, then refines his estimate as Tony bounces up from the shoreline and Nat casually strolls after him, “strike that, one drowning rat and another who can swim.”

Wilson clocks Jim's disturbed expression and explains, beer bottle poised at his lip, “Tenement living, then trooping across Europe.”

“You know,” Steve adds philosophically, “most of them _can_ swim.”

“Man knows his vermin.”

“I think that’s harsh,” Jim demurs, “The whole set of ‘em are just scrappy, that's all.”

From the day they met in college, Jim had an image of Tony as fragile, brilliant and focused. Performing best on a closed track with a pit crew. Then he lost him. After he came back, Jim discovered that the fragility was because Tony had been broken, and now he was shattered, and in truth he was more like a derby car that would run until it was just a hunk of scrap metal on a drive train.

It’s hard for Jim to look at this kid, nearly the same age as when they met. He not only remembers this Tony, he also knows him way better than he knows himself. That makes Jim want to laugh, and cry, and shake some sense into this kid. And he can’t.

Nat still gives him the creeps, full stop.

Tony spikes the surfboard into the sand and takes a deep breath with a long pause, eyebrows arched, high drama, getting the audience riled.

“Spit it out already, Jesus,” Jim really needs to rein it in, but honestly, old habits die hard and this was part of the game, the call and response.

“You must have seen me walking on water back there. Can’t woodwork worth a damn, but I’ll take it. I need a claim to fame.” Tony looks back to see Nat coming up behind him, dwarfed by her board but carrying it with ease. “ _Someone_ punched a _shark_.”

The sole response is a gasp from Sam. He probably doesn’t believe it, but his shock sounds restrained and genuine enough to launch Tony into the story instead of into a rant about his jaded audience.

“I didn’t actually notice the damned thing until she pointed it out. We were paddling out for the last run, and I nearly put the wet in wetsuit when I spotted what she was watching, but the next thing I know it’s circling, and she just--” Tony makes a fist and mimes a downward smack with a pop of his tongue, “it was like it remembered it left the oven on, _shoom_ , out to sea.”

Jim sighs. Sam might think it’s bullcrap, but Tony was never one for tall tales. Disturbing truth, outrageous description, taking things too literally for shits and giggles, running off at the mouth, all of these things yes. But Jim is dead certain the little snub-nosed pixie did haul off on a shark to shoo it away.

Nat plants the board next to her like a shield and stands her ground, adding quietly, “You thump them. Proves you’re too much trouble to eat.”

Steve tilts his head to look at her with a soft fondness. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

~*~

Between his accustomed hours and the jet lag between DC and Malibu, Steve doesn’t even try to get back to sleep when his eyes pop open at two in the morning. He runs up and down the shore for an hour, and when he slips back into the beach house he tries to be quiet and doesn’t turn on any lights. He doesn’t need them anyway.

He’s in the kitchen drinking another glass of milk when he hears someone else stir, in the hall by the big linen closet where the attic stairs can be pulled down, which means it’s Nat. He hasn’t told the others that she starts out the night in the room assigned to Tony, or that once his quiet snore starts, she creeps up into the attic to kip.

He keeps it in the back of his mind whenever the team gathers to talk in Pepper's study. Steve has enough experience now to know it's the best way to get info to Nat in a way she'll trust.

Maybe he’s being naive, and certainly a part of his brain balks at the impropriety, while another counters with all the ways in which pearl clutching is ridiculous in this situation. Most importantly, he remembers after his mother passed that the only decent sleep he got for months was with his back pressed against Buck. How Bucky had shoved his back against him in turn, in the weeks after he pulled him out of that camp.

Steve turns on the stove light, pulls out eggs, butter and cheese, and sets two plates on the counter with precise clicks. The first omelette comes out uneven because Pepper’s cookware here is surprisingly beaten up, but he eats that mistake as he fixes a second one, and by the time he shakes it out onto the plate there’s a little slip of a redhead seated at the counter watching him.

“The other adults don’t like to talk to me. I make them uncomfortable.”

Steve hums and slides the plate to her, pulling a fork out of a drawer.

“You don’t disagree.”

Steve pours her a glass of milk, and opens a few cabinets looking in vain for Ovaltine. He feels a sudden sharp kinship with Winny Barnes. He used to feel so guilty eating her food, he’d had no idea until now that the need to feed him was a physical ache. “Tuck in, Nat, you’re a growing girl.”

Her head tilts like a hunting owl, like a bewildered cat. “You react differently.”

He shrugs, and shovels in another bite of omelette.

She really is half-grown, her skills those of a prodigy, her persona polished uncannily smooth and as artfully fresh as her rosy cheeks. She gives people the creeps because she's devoid of the divots and cracks the adult Natasha had let herself acquire, the reality she allowed herself to show to those she saw as friends, as found family.

Unlike Nick, or Tony, or Bruce, Natasha doesn’t have a natural untampered personality to fall back on, maybe not since she was in preschool, and she hasn't yet had the freedom to get to know herself again.

Like many of the adults, Steve has been struggling between professionalism and painful empathy; should he run this like a mission, or should be simply be there for his friends in need? In this moment, he still has no answer, only fierce protectiveness. 

“Tell me,” her voice is small, throaty, and she grips the fork tightly, “tell me why do I care what you think of me, what they think of me?”

“Kid, I hate to say this, but I’m not sure you’ll even understand it until you’re older.”

~*~

Nat keeps some clothes and gear in the room assigned to her, but she doesn’t sleep there even when she isn't being used as a human blanket by the scion. She prefers the spot she’s scouted in the attic.

As she dozes in the quilt she brought up into the rafters she can hear the adults in the kitchen talking when they think the kids aren’t awake or around. A few feet away there's a vent where she can eavesdrop on Pott's home office, where they retire to discuss the ramifications of what has been done to their friends.

So when Nat sees the shopping bag on the still-made bed, she assumes it’s from Potts, meant to jog her memory perhaps. Soft leather slippers in black and pink, and dancewear. She shoves it all back into the bag and stalks to where Potts is working in the sunny living room.

“No, thank you.” She uses her blandest voice as she sets the bag on the coffee table. She will not show how angry she is that they know this about her, because that would only confirm that they’ve struck a nerve.

Potts blinks, her fingers completing typing even as her full attention swivels to Nat. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sorry that you went to the trouble, but I cannot make use of these things.”

“Actually, since the tags are off, it’s more trouble to bother returning it…” There’s an amusement behind the woman’s gentleness that grates. “Though I do recommend the slippers just for wearing around the house. I was terrible at the barre, but I still keep a few pairs around for when the floor is too cold for bare feet--which means all mine are in New York, but that’s beside the point. We can donate them to a studio if you’d like, but since they’re technically a gift, that might be awkward.”

“Gift from whom?” Nat knows the contents of the bag. “There is no note, no message.”

Potts licks her lips delicately, as if her words need careful arranging, “I suspect the point was simply to give you something nice, of your own, to enjoy.”

Nat decisively snags the bag handle with one finger and takes her leave of Pepper with a nod.

She has been given trinkets and flowers, jewelry and dresses; she has been given a dacha that she set ablaze the same evening; she has been given a severed finger that she returned to its rightful owner. She has been given midgrade caviar and she has been given lollipops.

She has been equipped with many kinds of shoes, but they have never been a gift.

~*~

“Hard drive?” Nick’s one knee bounces frenetically, but his interlaced fingers are lax in his lap. It’s a tell so obvious that on the real Nick Fury, it would be nonverbal sardonic commentary.

Maria reminds herself that this _is_ the real Nick Fury, just under the influence of his own adolescence. She plays along as if he really is nervous, and not just trying to convince her he is.

“It’s okay, you can tell me about the hard drive. The prisoner you took was one of the scientists developing the age-reversal metamorphosis, and he’s decided to start cooperating. He gave us file names, and let us know that Tony dumped a backup into a portable drive before you guys torched the place.”

The knee stills, pretense forgotten, and he leans back further into the leather sofa. Trepidation, wariness, and curiosity burst like fireworks on his face. Jesus, this is like seeing your grandmother blotto drunk. Some veils should not be torn asunder.

“Thought Dr. Cho said this was temporary.”

Maria waves this off. Instead of a concrete prognosis, Dr. Cho had delivered a paragraph riff on the words _tampering, generalist, temporal, geneticist, temporary, gestalt and temerity_. It was less than useless, but Wilson had nodded in what seemed to be the right places about letting memory recovery happen organically. Dr. Cho had also implied that the physical transformation should also revert in time, without saying it outright in a way she could be held to. Until Maria can convince the rest of the team to bring in Simmons for a consult, that’s all she has to go on. “I want to catch the people who did this. There’s money behind it, an agenda, and they’ll try again if we don’t root it all out now.”

“ _We_? You’ve got a mouse in your pocket?” Nick’s not yet capable of the vivisection via snarky commentary that Maria has always secretly enjoyed from her boss, but he offers the ghost of that penetrating stare as he adds drily, “I’m pretty sure the four of us don’t have permission slips for that kind of field trip.”

“About that,” Maria offers, like a quirky observation about the weather, “you also don’t technically have guardians who could sign them. Which leaves us a lot of grey area to work with, frankly.”

Nick takes this in with a small smile that gives Maria concerns about what kind of reports she may have to write when this is all over. “I’ll see what I can find for you.”

~*~

It's near midnight when Tony wanders out onto the veranda.

Pepper closes her laptop and turns her face into the breeze off the ocean, thinking of all the nights she's fled here to decompress, and wasn't it inevitable that he'd follow her here eventually? And yes, she'd invited the whole lot of them, and yes, she's been working from here as much as possible in violation of the only other rule her retreat ever had, but needs must doesn't mean she can't also resent that hefound a loophole in her beach house’s _No Tony Stark_ rule.

“So you run Stark Industries,” Tony says, playing with his soda can the same way he plays with a rocks glass, “and so the family business moves on without the family.”

Pepper reads business models and blueprints and between the lines all day, and this Tony is painfully easy to read, all brains and balls and bruised heart. “You didn’t lose it, you know.”

“Of course not,” he quips, “that’s why they call it a hostile takeover--”

“You _chose_ me,” she says, running right over him.

It’s a testament to his youth that he sputters to a stop and lets her speak.

“You still own the majority of the shares, it’s still your asset, your company, a part of your legacy. One part. Not the whole, not anymore.”

He glances up a few times while she speaks, like trying to squint through glare, and she wishes he'd make real eye contact because that was always when the penny dropped for Tony, when he really saw her.

“And you were never a bad steward, never some... _trust fund baby_...you worked hard at R &D, you did the dog & pony show sales and PR, and you made sure SI took care of its employees. Even before you got out of weapons, you worked to make your corner of the military industrial complex a net positive good in the world--even when you were, frankly, kind of shit at everything else.” Pepper laces her fingers together and sets them on her knee, giving him a haughty look and then a smile, “And you hand-picked me for the helm when you couldn’t give it the focus it deserved.”

Tony finally gives her a steady gaze in the light spilling out from the living room. He relaxes.

Pepper’s heart bottoms out at the respect and gratitude paired with zero recognition. She ruthlessly controls her face as he takes his leave with a charismatic nod that's less sincere than the full grown version. It's not like it's a surprise that this Tony doesn't really know her.

It's that he doesn't really know her but he trusts her anyway. That's the exact vulnerability Obie exploited.

~*~

Maria knows that Pepper looks at Nat and sees brilliance and control and ambition, and feels a kinship with the girl fresh from the Red Room. There was a lot of truth to Natalie Rushman, after all. But Maria looks at Nat and sees a scorpion tucked inside a shoe--she isn’t intimidated, she’s simply practical about small dangerous things that kill to survive.

Pepper gives Maria an address in Thousand Oaks for an SI pilot project now merged into a bigger division. The dismantled office is in a soulless industrial park and looks like it was the den of analysts, plastered with whiteboards, a punching bag still hanging in the corner next to a wall pocked with an eclipse of dart holes. Nat hadn’t asked any questions during the twenty minute ride from the beach house, had just serenely watched the scenery, and followed Maria through the smoked glass doors into the cool beige respite of the office. The books Laura sent sit in their opened FedEx box on an abandoned desk, a different kind of scorpion waiting in a shoe.

Maria begins with an admission that she knows Nat will see as a transparent bid for connection. “I've been assured by the best,” she tips a nod, “that my Russian is terrible.”

Nat offers a bland smile, the very picture of a bored but scrupulously polite teen. Maria walks over to one of the whiteboards and tries a couple dry markers before finding one with ink in it, and starts drawing out her timeline and diagrams.

“My intel, however, I take real pride in. So I'm going to just let my shitty accent fly as I bring you up to speed.” She feels Nat’s eyes boring into her back as she adds the first label in handwritten Cyrillic; a part of Maria will always enjoy that moment when someone realizes they’ve underestimated her. “Feel free to interrupt if I mangle anything beyond comprehension, but my expert told me the terminology itself is fascinating.”

Nat's eyes skitter over the Russian words for “listening" and “openness" and “public joint stock company”, and her expression would be unreadable if Maria had not seen Natasha shocky from a through and through. Score.

“So,” she claps her hands and gives a smile both bright and wolfish, “here's how the wheels came off the Soviet Union…”


	2. Kids These Days

### Kids These Days

It was Nat's idea to gather outside to talk, so Nick took the other handle of the big iron fire pot and they carried it down onto the beach. Those tiny slim hands had patted them all down for bugs, tossing a couple suspect clothing tags into the fire like nits. But then she hadn't said a peep.

She hasn’t said much at all since Maria Hill took her out of the house early that morning, dressed for exercise but with the glum trepidation of getting a cavity fixed. She'd come back sweaty, fists wrapped for boxing, and disappeared into the attic with a stack of books in English and Russian.

It's not that they're unaware something is terribly wrong, that _they_ are terribly wrong. A million details too subtle to describe, too immense to ignore, illustrate that they are in their own futures, the guests of honor at their own wakes, and all of the mourners surrounding them are strangers.

Some of the adults find it hard to look at them, every conversation a minefield, all the answers they give wrong or disappointing somehow. From the inside it’s ridiculous and frightening by turns. They each have a sense of where in their own history they're unmoored from, but it's unnervingly unspecific. They're left careening through an arbitrary maze of relationships and expectations built by some asshole older version of themselves they only get glimpses of in dreams, in ephemeral thoughts, in reactions they can't explain or quite control.

It's infuriating. But Nick is a pro at banking his anger and investing it for the future. While Nat had studied her stack of books, and the white boys had holed up and gone through the hard drive of useless lab notes for the hundredth time, Nick had been considering their options.

Arrayed around the fire, he now considers his companions.

“I think my future self is terminal,” Tony says, “they all look so sad around the edges when they talk to me, like they wanna cry but don't want to spook me.”

“Could be worse,” Nick threads a marshmallow onto a stick already plastered with carbonized goo. “They look at _him_ like in a minute he's gonna climb a clock tower with a high power rifle…”

Bruce shrugs into his sweater. To be fair, he’s probably the most likeable white guy with anger issues Nick has encountered, but he’s not going to let him off the hook until he knows what the raging guilt is about, and so he picks.

“...except when they look at him like a war orphan,” Nick breezes past that to let it sink in, gesturing like a magician to where Natasha nibbles at a graham cracker in between shots of vodka. “And then they look at _her_ like she's undertow.”

Nick had found her bloodied hand wraps shoved down in the upstairs bathroom trash, peeking out of a partly unwrapped sanitary pad like that’s where the blood had come from instead of her scabbed knuckles. They've all seen her violent--they owe their lives to her ability to harm with extreme prejudice and efficiency--but Nick thinks Maria made Nat _truly mad_ the way Bruce gets mad. Unhinged with it. That it had freaked her out.

He knows it's ridiculous to feel protective of her. He does anyway.

Tony reaches into Natasha’s lap and steals the vodka, taking a swig like it’s lemonade. Nick has some likely theories about what his contemporaneous self might be dying of. It’s like he says it aloud the way Tony’s eyes glitter and he jabs, “And you; they look at you like you’re Head Boy.”

Bruce darts a warning look to Tony, but it’s Natasha who speaks up. “I’m a security risk.”

Nick sets aside his impulse to punch Tony in the mouth for the _boy_ crack--he’s not so easily played as all that, especially when someone’s trying to get a rise out of him. He turns to Natasha to follow-up. “I’d be lying if I said that surprised me.”

“They took you out of the house to tell you that, and then brought you back,” Bruce sounds annoyed. “That confirms we are on lockdown here no matter what it looks like.”

“Soft quarantine,” she says, “we can leave whenever we want, it will just take a little more effort than walking out the door. Certainly less than the first place.”

“I need to get home.” Nick decides to take the risk. “My mother and my sister will be worried. I need to make sure they’re safe.”

“Where is home?” Bruce asks.

“Sterling, Virginia.”

Natasha turns to Tony, “Small airports near here.”

“What? I mean, my dad has a hangar at Van Nuys, but--”

“You can get us there?”

“--you can’t just--can you even fly a plane?”

Natasha looks at him like that’s the stupidest question she’s heard all week.

Bruce steals the bottle of vodka from Tony, “I think that means she can fly a plane.”

“Find me an airfield,” she says, “the rest is easy.”

“Why the fuck not, then,” he throws up his hands. “This place gives me the creeps. You in Bruce?”

Nick isn’t thrilled by the idea of taking the boys along. “Where do you want to go instead, then, Disneyland?”

Bruce answers for them, “Fort Wayne, Indiana.”

Tony's only objection is, “I thought you were from Ohio?”

“I am from Ohio. I live in New Mexico.” Bruce takes a long pull from the bottle. “My father is in Indiana.”

“We’ll need to refuel anyway,” Natasha says, “we can drop you off close by.”

He nods and hands the bottle to Nick, “Lets make plans, then.”

~*~

“I mean, maybe.” Tony has become their de facto source for forbidden items, it seems. He stops where the sand of the beach turns to scrubby grass near the house and lays a hand on Bruce’s good shoulder. “But do you really think we’ll _need_ a gun?”

“I think we should be prepared.” The kid’s brow is furrowed, “We’re on our own with this, you realize? Nat’s getting out while she still has a chance, Nick’s trying to do right by his family. It’s up to us to figure out what we need to do, and then get it done.”

“Like visiting your dad.” It’s not quite true to say that Tony’s been avoiding thinking of his own parents, he’s just been coasting along like he usually does during a semester away. He knows they’re dead, but his mind skirts it like working around a healing soldering iron burn. “You didn’t live with him?”

“He’s on a locked ward, so no.” With that zinger, Bruce trudges off into the grass.

Tony scrambles after, but Bruce is locked down tight himself once they get back into the brightness of the beach house.

~*~

It's the quiet ones you've gotta watch; Bruce knows this because he's usually the quietest one. Nick, however, is both quiet and still. 

He never loses his temper, never breaks a sweat, and knows far more than he lets on. Even when they all woke up in a cage, he gave the impression that maybe he was just waiting for when it suited him to leave.

So when Nick comes by Bruce's room to pick up the hard drive they'd taken from the lab, he's not surprised when Nick sits down on the floor. Wary, but not surprised.

His back is to the dresser, and he's perpendicular to Bruce, turning over the drive in his long fingers. He should be off planning with Nat, bent heads conferring in whispered half sentences like when they busted out of the compound, discussing mayhem and destruction like plotting out a night of D&D.

“Tony showed me the clips, of the experiments,” Nick's tone is measured and soft when he finally speaks, “what they had planned for us, he said.”

“Yeah.” That's what Tony says, and Bruce can't explain how he knows, but he can hear that's also what Tony believes.

Nick catches Bruce's eyes and asks, “You know that's you, right?”

And yeah, Bruce knows that too. “One of the versions of me.”

~*~

Bruce opens the linen closet door and instead of the shelves he expects, he's confronted with a small room. His hand still hovers mid air, ready to reach for a towel. “Riiiight,” he mutters, taking a cautious step inside. Rich people.

He stumbles against the shelves.

The door clicks shut behind him.

He whirls, fists up the way Tony had shown him in the cell.

Nat leans against the door, thumb hooked in the pocket of her jeans, a wad of black and pink in her other hand. She looks casual and preppy, blowing a bubble of grape flavored gum, pure boredom on her face. It feels like she’s pissed.

“Heyyyy...Nat…” Bruce shoves his hands in his pockets. “What’s up?”

“What the hell?” She flings open her hand and shoes hit the floor between them with a surprising clatter. He’s never seen ballet shoes in person, and had assumed Pepper would get the satin slipper kind with ribbons, but these are canvas and leather, stiff and new. “Is this some kind of bribe?”

“A wha--? You said you actually liked to d--”

“Are you trying to soften me up?” She steps forward, all sharp chin and eyes. “What’s your game, smartass?”

“My _game_?” The shelves catch Bruce in the back, and annoyance surges. She’d pushed him into this stupid glorified closet, keeps pushing still. He meets her in the middle and enunciates each word, “I thought it’d be a nice thing to do, that’s my _game_.” 

“Why?” She’s right up in his nose, staring up at him from under auburn slashes of eyebrows. “Why these?”

He stops and takes a few mental steps backward, “You told me about the dancing when you popped my arm into the socket. You said it would be just like putting a toe back in place.”

Nat stares down at the shoes, her face unreadable before it smooths out. “It was different than a toe.”

“I’ll take your word on that. I was too busy to observe objectively, what with the screaming.” She’d put her face right in his and said it was going to hurt, then swung around to plant her foot in his armpit and yanked like she aimed to tear his arm the rest of the way off. He’d had flash of memory of her dancing despite pain, ribbons trailing and smiling with cold sweat on her brow, and then he’d howled and blacked out.

“You told me, once...you told me about performing with a, with some kind of injury,” he feels his own brow knit along with hers, the _feeling_ of the memory clear even as the details slip and slide, “how you reached past the pain for the purpose of it...which...shouldn’t make sense, but I think it does anyway.”

She’s shaking her head, wary, but he needs her to understand.

“I thought, since you trusted these people to get me the glasses, I could ask for you.”

She whispers, but he can’t make it out despite the bare handful of inches between them, so he joins her in staring stupidly at the shoes. Even strewn like a brace of songbirds discarded by a house cat, they look artful against the warm wooden floor of the linen closet room.

“I don’t remember telling you any of that. Anyone.” Nat swallows and repeats herself, pure monotone. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Fuck if I know, either,” Bruce sighs.

Nat reaches out with one sneaker and toes a rattan basket across the floor, shoving aside the pink and black scraps of shoes, squaring it up between them.

The next thing he knows she’s got two handfuls of his shirt and she’s barreling him into the shelves again, and when he opens his mouth to protest she’s up at his level and slipping him her grape-flavored tongue.

Bruce’s mind feels like a slow motion film of a bullet blowing apart an apple. The warm slide of her tongue against his, the plush texture of her taste buds. She’s tasting him back, how did he never think of that before? How solid she is, bone and muscle, the weight of her tipping him back against the soft linens stacked on the shelves. He’s kissed before, but fleeting, furtive, chapped dry on a dare or sloppy wet on a lark. Nat is so much better at this she’s slowed down into a demo mode that makes him squirm with embarrassment and other burning responses. The basket she’s on creaks, and her hands are on the move. The closet door doesn’t lock, and he’s trying to sort out what to do about that when she pulls back and gives him a look like she’s mad or hungry.

“Um,” he thinks his tongue doesn’t work for speech anymore, and is maybe resentful to be asked to make words when it wants to keep kissing instead.

Nat pirouettes neatly and comes to rest back on the basket, hands decidedly lower than they were before. A metal broom handle is now propped through the levered handle of the door.

“Okay,” he says, and this look blooms across her face exactly like when he’d shown her the metal butter knife back in the cell.

They neck so much his lips are buzzing when she stops again. He watches her pull pillows and folded duvets down onto the floor without comprehension, dazed from the scent of her skin.

“Shirt,” she says, stripping off her own.

Bruce notes that she doesn’t ask for things, the most polite she ever gets is to state with an air of command instead of taking. Then he notes that her bra is cotton, white with red trim and polka dots. It makes his fingers itch, and he nervously balls his own shirt up between his hands until she sinks down and pulls him after her. She still somehow ends up on top of him, straddling him like a pony.

“What happened to your gum?”

She catches his hands and plants them right onto her boobs. “Swallowed it.”

“Huh.” One of her nipples juts into his palm, and his other thumb goes searching for its companion. It doesn’t take long before they match, before she unhooks her bra and lays her chest down on his, luxurious and soft around those two pink pebble points.

He’s out of his mind with the feel of her skin, the slow rock of her against his dick, the things she’s doing to his neck with her tongue. When she pops the button on his jeans it’s like being jolted awake.

The smirk on her face is doing lethal things to him even before she reaches in and frees his dick. Her pony tail is already a mess, so he slides his fingers into her hair and does his best to kiss her like she’s shown him, trying to keep himself together. He’s worked up enough that when she swipes a thumb over his head her fingers glide, and it’s entirely different from how he does himself; that’s all that keeps him on this side of the edge, his curiosity about her technique.

Nat opens her own jeans. She nuzzles against his ear and whispers, just articulated breath, “Feel how wet I am.”

Bruce hesitates a moment, and she grabs his wrist again and levers his hand down her belly and into her cotton panties.

He tries to think of clinical anatomical diagrams to gain some distance, regain some control. It doesn’t work, because a map is not the territory, especially when the territory is tropical paradise. “Tell me what to do, what you like…”

Her hand slows, tightens. Nat meets his eyes, “I…just…”

He gently pulls her hand off him--slow and thorough will not take long at all, and he doesn’t want to get there without her--and he wriggles out from under her so they’re side by side. Her cheeks are now bright red like her lips. “Can I see?”

She nods, hesitantly pushing her jeans off until it’s just her panties askew on her hips, sprigs of bright coppery hair.

Bruce has no follow up. He lays there propped on his elbow, dick in hand like he’s staring at the holy of holies and waiting to see if he goes up in flames.

Instead Nat’s face is burning red, and she mutters, “This is ridiculous--”

“If you were alone, what would you do?”

She rises up on her spread knees to stare down at him. He can smell her and it’s surreal and amazing. “What, do you want operating instructions?”

“What if I do?” He bristles, “Is it easier or harder than flying a plane?”

“Fuck you,” she slips her hand into her panties and starts rubbing one out, her face cooling and kind of spiteful and Bruce is mesmerized by the fast gentle flicks. “Infuriating smartass is what you are,” she pants, curling around herself. He curls up around her in turn, mouthing at a swollen nipple as she fists his hair. She starts to shake, and he comes first like tumbling down a gravel hill, still holding on as she makes a low squeak and shudders.

She eventually pushes him away, but there’s a lopsided smile on her face that makes him laugh, and when they’ve put the closet and themselves into some semblance of order, she offers him a square of her hideous grape gum.

~*~

“How are you doing this evening, ma’am?”

“Just fine, young man, and yourself?”

“Absolutely peachy.”

Nick and Pepper have gone several rounds of polite ping pong, as he fell back on how he was raised and refused to call her by her first name no matter how she insisted, no matter how casual he got when alone with Jim and Sam, or even Steve. She’s his host, and she’s a more formidable person than she thinks she comes across as. Nick knows some guards aren't really ever safe to fully dismantle.

He kind of enjoys that he's made her revert from _Nick_ to _young man_ in a strange mix of retaliation and respect. 

It’s late enough that the markets have closed in New York and she’s in casual wear similar to the better brands of clothes she’s outfitted them with. She’s still working, but has shut down her screens in favor of paper documents and small rimless reading glasses.

“We're ordering pizza, ma’am, late night snack. Did you have any requests?”

“No, thank you, young man.” She’s been using a service, perhaps a personal chef off site, stocking the little kitchen with reheatable meals with chic handwritten labels, along with fruit and cheese and big boxes of cereal. “Just, please remind Tony not to flash his cash when paying.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He'd wheedled a thick roll of hundreds from her earlier in the week. This was apparently such a mundane thing for Tony Stark to have in his pocket that even though they only left the house on rare supervised outings like Bruce going to the optometrist, the next day she'd handed it over with the weary caveat not to buy anything illegal. Nick turns on his way out to ask, oh so casually, “Deputy Director Hill had inquired about something… is she expected back soon?”

Pepper Potts has an admirable poker face, “Oh, um, tomorrow afternoon, she said.” She turns the page on the brief she's annotating, fingers hovering toward the pen behind her ear, adding distractedly, “I can pass a message along…”

Nick fiddles with the drive in his pocket, shifting his weight with indecision calculated to catch her eye. Pepper is holding the fort down solo due to conflicting duties and schedules; day nine and the crisis has shifted focus to the investigation of the mad scientists, and away from the human guinea pigs stranded at the beach house. They've been quiet, they've been good, and the weather is perfect for flying clear to the Gulf.

“I'm not part of SHIELD, or…any of it, officially, but you wouldn't be here if it wasn't safe, if I wasn't worthy of your trust.” Her lips purse with rueful amusement. “Make of that what you will.”

They only need her out of the house for an hour, the security detail a mere trifle. Nick pulls out the drive, and knows she's on the hook. Nat had confirmed that everyone was on the lookout for it to resurface, to get their hands on the files Tony had copied. “This info can't just be sent like an email. But Hill needs to see it immediately.”

“That's from the lab.” She shoves the glasses up into her hair and her eyes track the drive as Nick lays it down on the coffee table in front of her with a click.

“It is.”

Pepper mutters, “That little shit, I knew it.”

Nick averts his eyes, a show of chagrin that hides his heart, “Yes, ma’am.”

~*~

The file is time-stamped six hours after Tony had taken off in the jet with Fury and Romanoff, on a rescue mission. Eight hours after the signal had been detected and JARVIS had filtered out a code from the seemingly random pulses of barely traceable gamma coming out of the Northern Cascades.

It’s the last video clip of Dr. Bruce Banner in his familiar forty-odd form.

There are data layers to click on or off: thermal and radiation imaging, and real-time physiological monitoring of a depth and intrusiveness that made Dr. Cho squint and look like she was going to punch the screen. He wasn’t just back on the grid, he was being vivisected by it. A rundown of lab notes scroll in a sidebar.

> **_[Conditions approaching maximum levels recommended for test conditions]_**  
>  _hour 112 of REM deprivation_  
>  _hour 56 (nonconsecutive) in stressor environment_  
> 
> 
>   * _83 dB blue noise_
>   * _97,040 lx mixed sodium lighting_
>   * _10℃_
> 

> 
> _**[Indications of imminent metamorphosis]**_  
>  _moderate dehydration_  
>  _core temp 33.2℃_  
>  _heart rate 174 bpm_  
>  _disrupted pattern of brain activity continues_  
> 
> 
>   * _87% low-amplitude beta waves avg. 36±3 Hz_
>   * _episodes of high-amplitude 0.3±0.04 Hz delta waves_
> 


Dr. Banner is past the scraggly edge where unshaven becomes an unkempt beard. He’s strapped to an inclined metal table, his hands only capable of fisting in the thin scrub pants that hang low on his hips. He’s shivering. The lighting is bright sickly yellow, and a piercing static noise makes it hard to determine if the hitching of his chest is a sob or choked laughter, but when he speaks he bellows loud enough that it’s impossible to mistake his cheerful, overly-resonant “FUCK YOU!”

It gets as far as his skin darkening and swelling. Tendons ripping. Bruce slamming his head back against the metal with a hard clang. Again. Once more.

Then he reins it back in and sags in the straps, dwindling down with every ragged exhale. The sidebar scrolls with thousands of data points of energy and physiology.

“So much information, carefully logged,” Helen murmurs, “but they failed to realize he was producing a simple coded signal with controlled pulses of gamma.”

The signal was Tony’s alphanumeric log-in to the lab he’d set aside for Bruce, that had sat empty for eight months. Tony had been running scans for gamma ever since, a minuscule side program on a handful of SI’s geosynchronous mapping satellites. Leaving the porch light on. The pulses of gamma were just above background noise, but they were the password rendered in binary, and even with the vagaries of human timing and drawn out over the course of twenty minutes to cycle through, that was a shout aimed right at Tony through JARVIS.

Bruce’s face screws up in anguish and his mouth moves, inaudible.

“He says,” Clint captions in a monotone, “‘ _Fuck all’a you if you think it’s gonna be that easy. Least the last one bought me a drink first_.’”

“Unfortunately, close enough was all they needed.” Dr. Cho sweeps her hand across the tablet and brings up four separate windows, pausing for Pepper to look back at the screen. Four bodies litter the floor of the glaringly yellow room, three of them crumpled in clothes too big. “Once they had sufficient data on the physical transformation, they were able to fine tune the artificial metamorphic field for the age regression technology.”

“Meanwhile at the perimeter, they took out half the quinjet’s systems with an EMP cannon and brought it down hard.” Maria says, “Our team hit the ground running, infiltrated the compound, and broke into the chamber to free Dr. Banner. The order was given to use the metamorphic field as a weapon of last resort.”

“Oh my God, this was a lab accident?” Pepper’s fingers reach toward the screen where the fourth body lies half-buried in dismantled armor pieces. 

“No.” Helen sets the tablet on the table and gives it a sharp push, sending it sliding away. “This is not _science_. This is cutting someone open to eat his heart and steal his strength. And then sacrificing his friends as test animals. This isn’t discovery, it’s thirst for power.”

“Tactical desperation.” Clint uncrosses his arms and elaborates, “Either way you take out half the Avengers. And if they live, you’ve got expendable guinea pigs for free.”

“Yeah well, they didn’t take one thing into account: the reason they’re Avengers in the first place is that they’re wildcards who’re hard to kill,” Maria adds, digging out her buzzing phone and unlocking the screen, “Aw, motherf--or _contain_.”


	3. Little Lambs on the Lam

### Little Lambs on the Lam

Tony wakes up first, and sees another boy with dark hair on the floor beside him, a redheaded girl, and a black kid who looks tall even lying down.

He doesn’t know where he is. He tries not to panic. This isn’t the first time he’s woken up in a strange place not knowing how he got there.

Granted, this isn’t waking up in a bathtub of glitter, or in fishnets, or in the workshop, or some college dorm. This is...cell like. Thick door and a barred window too high and narrow to shimmy through. The slop bucket in the corner really pulls the room together.

Tony’s head aches like a motherfucker, but not like a hangover, chemical or alcohol. It’s not the hollow buzz of dawn after burning the midnight oil. It pulses like a migraine, a nauseating concussion, his head ringing. He spots a series of plastic cafeteria trays clustered by the door.

“The water is fine,” the girl says, propping up on an elbow, “I wouldn’t eat the bread though.”

Tony studies her. “You getting that from old Nancy Drew books or from Ian Fleming’s oeuvre?”

Her eyes are very green, and she holds his gaze steadily. “Do what you want.” She takes her hair and wraps it into a loose knot.

The white boy squints at her. The black boy cracks open one of the waters and leaves the bread.

Tony is a nibbler, a snacker, and he suspects the queasiness is from not eating. The bread might settle his stomach, maybe ease the headache.

The last thing he remembers before the vomiting starts is the white kid saying, “I have this weird feeling like I’m supposed to protect you guys. Which is stupid. I don’t even know you.”

~*~

“Protective, huh?” The black kid grabs the white boy by the back of the t-shirt, scruffing him like a kitten, and hauls him to the bucket just in time for bread and bile to come launching. He’s standing now, full height extended for the first time. “See if you can help him make better decisions, then.”

The white boy is a spasming mess, gasping air between bouts of vomiting.

The girl hasn’t moved, not even a curl of her lip at the smell.

None of this changes the heavy thud of Bruce's heart, guilt and agitation, like he's responsible.

~*~

Luckily it’s all come out the front end. It’s bad enough using the bucket with three strangers, bad enough shivering and heaving while the black kid makes him drink water to have something to puke and the white kid bangs on the door to get another fresh bucket.

The girl just watches him, and the other two, and the slow crawl of sunlight through the glass blocks set high in the wall, and the guards when they deign to open the doggy door and shove a jug of water and another bucket through.

Tony lurches to a stop in the early morning. He’s dozed off in a tight curl, temple pressed against the smooth shop floor concrete, waking to find the black kid’s hoodie draped over him like a blanket. He thinks he might have to heave again, but that’s not what woke him up.

“Stay down, stay calm.” The girl’s eyes glitter in the dark, no longer sitting propped against the wall but shifted to the corner away from the door, crouched like she's scared but her voice and her contained energy are anything but. “The rest of you can play it by ear, but trust me.”

The white kid’s awake, but doesn’t move from where he’s stretched out, head on his own balled up jacket. The black kid looks dead asleep, but Tony doubts that’s true.

The locks disengage. The door opens.

The room fills with more guards than kids, all shouting, noise and confusion, but it’s a distraction. They’re here for Tony.

Gloved hands scoop him off the floor, cheap blue latex and bruising fingers. He’s only holding on to calm through dehydration, his heart hammering but his muscles weak, his ribs and belly burning from hours of vomiting.

The girl starts screaming.

The other guards wrestle the two boys in earnest now, pinning them down as Tony’s dead weight is hauled up and dragged across the floor.

The panicked screaming echoes off all the concrete like an icepick through the brain.

She’s thrashing, and that high-pitched cornered animal shrieking comes in arrhythmic bursts, she’s all elbows and knees and killer frequency and it shifts.

Tony hits the floor.

The white kid has a knee in the middle of his back and a hand shoving his face into the concrete, his bared teeth bloody. The black kid has been zip-tied and has a gun at his temple, and is taking deep breaths with his eyes nearly closed. Tony takes a boot to the stomach and spends the next few moments trying to pull air into his lungs without retching.

The door slams shut, bolts thudding. The screaming shatters into hysterical sobbing, the guards grim with coordinated effort as they all work to immobilize her.

The white kid throws himself against the door, roaring vicious profanity.

She gives a last piercing shriek and falls silent. The outer door clangs shut.

The screaming has stopped. The girl is gone.

The black kid rocks onto his back and when he rolls forward again his bound hands are now in front. “Good job staying calm, there.”

“Fuck you.”

He shrugs and starts nipping at the zip tie with his teeth.

Tony’s eyes sting, phantom tears he’s too wrung out to spill. He clenches his teeth.

The white kid notices the blood on his mouth, and in a practiced motion ducks his head down and runs his tongue over his teeth to clean them.

~*~

Natasha does not have a brief for this mission.

It's concerning but not dire, since the captivity situation is unfolding slowly. The aim seems to be to soften and break them, fairly standard tactics except for the lack of isolation. It means something that she's been put with these children. Adolescents, whatever. _Civilians_ being the material point.

She’d been content to observe until the Scion - Tony as he’d introduced himself, the only one who had - had been stupid enough to let them poison him. That narrowed her options, but also presented the opportunity to gather intelligence outside the cell. She isn’t interested in any of them being broken just yet until she knows more about the players and the situation. Luckily, Slim is a strategist, and while the tantrum thrown by Smartass could have become a problem, the guards are apparently amused by his impotent rage and content to throw a few jeers as they drag her away.

Just in case, Natasha jerks once and lets herself become dead weight, eyes rolled back and jittering. All four guards startle and wrench her limbs tighter, expecting a feint instead of a faint. Natasha has seen plenty of people out cold, and she plays her part right down to making her complexion go pale. She has all of their attention now, as they pull her through the doorway and lock the corridor to the cell.

Her charges are probably safe for now.

One of the guards slaps her cheek, rather lightly, then checks her pulse as if that can tell him anything. Other guards zip tie her wrists and ankles, and she’s thrown around someone’s shoulders like a field dressed deer.

They keep talking, and she builds a picture of the dynamics of the security force here, as well as using the acoustics to map out the spaces she’s moving through. She plots a floor plan in her mind’s eye. Playing possum is restful, until they come into a warmer space, square, muted sound indicating fabrics instead of the bare walls and cheap vinyl tile of the hallways. She’s swung down onto carpet, and is rolled onto her back by the pointed toe of a shoe. Thin leather, not a guard boot.

Natasha’s arms are awkward underneath her, but she stays crumpled where she lays. There’s another set of slaps, harder from a smaller hand, but she doesn’t so much as flutter a lash.

“This isn’t the one I asked for,” a woman speaks, a few feet from Natasha and near the ground; crouching to inspect her. “She’s been crying.”

“Went apeshit when we came for retrieval,” the guard in charge reports, “Hysterical, didn’t fight anything like before the procedure. Got so worked up she passed out, that’s why we brought her here instead.”

“Extraordinary,” the voice rises as the woman in charge stands. “You may carry her to the medbay. The doctors will be along shortly.”

The guards lift her by her armpits and ankles and take her through a different doorway into another room, echoing of tile and metal, bright lighting making her eyelids flare orange. She’s laid on a metal table, leather straps buckling her down. The doorway she came through shuts, but the conversation inside remains just barely audible for her.

The woman in charge asks, “You’re sure this isn’t a sign of fragility?”

A diffident sounding man murmurs, “On the contrary, what we were able to find of Romanoff’s records indicate a thoroughbred constitution; powerful, but easily overclocked before intervention and training.”

“Intervention--” the boss is surprised, “you’re saying the dial back has undone the physical alterations as well?”

“Banner is proof of that.” a second woman answers, presumably the other doctor mentioned.

“Hmm.” After a pause the boss asks, “And the other half of the process?”

“We’re still working on that part, ma’am,” the man begins, but he’s interrupted by his colleague.

“We have every indication it will work just as smoothly as the dial back,” she assures her boss, “we’ve been keeping them together to facilitate the mnemonic download into these earlier phenotypes.”

“Prime the pump, as it were,” says the man, “but also to test if spontaneous recall would occur.”

“None so far, alas.”

“Though in this case, it does give us a margin of control and safety, given the nature of these extra test subjects that have fallen into our lap.”

“Indeed.” the woman in charge sounds like she’s been down this road before, reluctance and avarice alike hidden beneath a slight disapproval. She wants very much for whatever this is to work, but is wary of her own hope and even more dubious of her staff. “Well, if nothing else, these test subjects are a boon in and of itself. Takes them off the board one way or the other.”

“We won’t fail,” the woman doctor is adamant, “we’ve already solved the physical reversion issue. Now that we have stable phenotype dial back, mnemonic download should be relatively simple.”

“Reset the clock, retain the memory. If you do succeed, we'll have a bigger problem to dispose of than right now...” the woman in charge walks toward the door, “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I won’t be convinced about stability just yet. Time will tell.”

~*~

They hadn’t asked Natasha for any information they didn’t already know. They’d probed to map her memories, rank amateurs, and then tested her reflexes and aim using some kind of computerized toy.

Miniaturization far beyond anything she’d encountered before, but they'd treated the tech like it was disposable. She gave them results just above normal, working the anxiety and fear because it was the only cover she had. They may know about the alterations done to her in the Red Room, but they think they've eliminated them, and that's an advantage she's keeping.

When they bring Natasha back into the cell, the three boys are sprawled out unconscious. The guards shove her and she lets herself stumble onto the floor, which is damp and smells of mentholated pine. The bucket is clean and empty but she doesn’t have to use it; her interrogation was light, and had supervised bathroom breaks.

As soon as the corridor clears, the other three start to stir. Short-acting gas anesthesia, then. They can be moved like zoo animals at any time, which means every interaction between them and the guards is calculated theatre.

~*~

Their lucky break comes in the form of silverware.

It’s been a long stretch of quiet, mind-numbing boredom. Lulling. They sleep in shifts now, though Bruce sleeps more than any of them, bone tired and exhausted and soaked in vivid dreams that dissipate like wet tissue by the time he raises his head.

There’s a dinner tray waiting for him, the same bland institutional fare they’ve been given since the bread and water incident. They take turns testing it, so Bruce is reassured by the nibbles taken out of the pressed chunk of processed turkey and the spork marks in the block of dry mashed potatoes.

Nick nods at him, a thin blanket around his shoulders. The wall furthest from the door holds a nest of bedding that Nat and Tony are buried under, the position of her tennis shoes peeking out indicating that she’s the bigger spoon.

“Baby boy’s from southern Cali,” Nick’s words leave a trail of vapor, “can’t take the cold.”

Bruce shakes his head and shakes out the paper napkin for the customary flimsy spork. They’re made of some kind of polymer that can barely hold up to food, possibly a modified starch, but he’d rather not eat this whole cold meal with his fingers, mashed potatoes gritty under his nails like classroom paste.

There’s a clatter as a metal fork and butter knife drop into the tray.

“Well now,” Nick whispers.

~*~

“Van Nuys...you mean the airfield?!” Jim had never worked directly with SHIELD--the War Machine/Iron Patriot liaison relationship between the DOD and SI was enough of a headache, thanks--but he’s gotten to know Maria Hill well enough during this Malibu clusterfuck that he can interpret her unimpressed blink for the eyeroll it wants to be.

“Our options are, to be frank, shitty and shittier, Rhodes. You know this. Is the line secure on your end?”

“Yes, stop stalling Hill.”

“Stop whining, Rhodes.”

Jim wipes his hands down his face and regains his professional composure.

“They took provisions from the safe house, and stole a series of cars to get to Van Nuys around two in the morning. They broke into the Stark Hangar there and took off shortly after. JARVIS is roughly tracking them for us,” there’s a hesitation before she adds, “and while he says he hasn't spoken to any of them, we suspect he's facilitating certain arrangements whenever possible.”

That's not a shocker. “Arrangements?”

“They refueled in Tucson using a very conveniently misplaced truck. We’ve independently verified evidence of tampering with the airfield work crew schedule, and the smoking gun of a wire transfer from one of Stark’s accounts for 120% of the cost of the stolen fuel.”

“So we have four rogue adolescent science experiments--our _friends_ \--midair going God knows where. Did they kidnap a pilot--who’s flying that thing?”

Maria’s tone is reassuring, though her answer is far from it, “When she joined SHIELD, Natasha reported she’d been trained on fixed wing aircraft since age fourteen. We suspect they’ve been planning this for the last week, waiting for favorable weather.”

Jim pictures her with the seat racked all the way forward, her shark-punching face on. “So we watch and wait, that’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Stopping them is even riskier. Are we going to lock them up? Confirm we’re no better than the facility they broke out of in the first place? Which they did with a set of cutlery, by the way--”

“Right.”

“--so you may remember we had a similar discussion when I brought them out there, instead of the other options tossed around.”

“We were hoping it’d wear off, in a relaxing environment.”

“Yeah,” Maria offers a short sharp sigh. “I’m not sure why we thought these four people would be good at relaxing.”

~*~

This is the fifth car Tony’s stolen, and it was much easier to find an early model he could hotwire in Memphis than in Malibu, but his hands shake even more than they did the first time.

Bruce leans against the open passenger door, facing away and refolding the map they ganked from the previous vehicle, muttering just loud enough for Tony to hear, “Maybe lay off the goddamned coffee.”

“Just because--ow! Just ‘cause you can sleep fucking anywhere--”

“Caffeine does not equal sleep--”

“Of course not.” The ignition fires up and Tony swings around in the seat and throws the transmission into drive, drumming on the steering wheel as Bruce awkwardly folds the map into his pocket and himself into the car. “Caffeine equals awake, alcohol equals sleep.”

~*~

They don't stay in the air long after dropping the white boys off outside of Memphis, and they end up ditching the plane in the boonies and stowing away on a couple of trucks to make their way into New Orleans. Nick leads her into a McDonald's where they clean up in the sinks and get a sackful of cheap calories.

They come out looking like college students in their backpacks and fresh neat clothes, and only a few minutes down the road a battered Honda pulls over, and a young white man with a long ginger beard offers them a ride.

Natasha charms Corey all the way to Tulane; she’s playing with him, it’s creepy and mean and hilarious. Nick flashes a bright grin whenever Corey looks in the rear view mirror at him. A little too often. Nick suspects he’s either the first black man in his car or the boy’s wondering if he and Nat are an exclusive item.

Nick doesn’t even know what he and Natasha are.

Nick offers him the last cheeseburger, and Nat smiles and props her sneakers up on the dashboard. Nick gives him bedroom eyes in the rear view mirror while Nat steals his phone and slips it to him. She licks salt from individual fries while he books tickets with the card she’d lifted off someone at the Mickey D’s.

When he's done he pretends to find it on the car floor, “I think this slipped out, man,” and Natasha playfully shoves it deep into the poor boy’s jeans pocket. They make Corey squirm, but there’s no harm in it. He drops them off at Tulane campus with a wistful expression and a wave, and they hoof it the long way to the train station.

There’s a line that runs through DC to New York, and a sleeper berth for them both, but there are hours to kill before departure. Natasha pulls them into a resale shop and gets him a jacket and tie, a leather portfolio and dress shoes. For herself she picks out a modest skirt and blouse, low matronly heels and a bible.

At a drug store she gets a few random trial sizes, a pair of scissors, and a box of mouse brown hair color.

~*~

Bruce takes over the driving once they leave Tennessee, and refuses to stop for either coffee or alcohol, just drive-through tacos. He punches up National Public Radio from station to station as they cut across the corners of Missouri and Illinois to trek across Indiana, a soft murmur of news and culture that Tony bitches about until he conks out when the sun goes down.

About a hundred miles out from Fort Wayne, Bruce pulls over and parks the car in tall scrub. Tony’s still out cold, seat levered all the way back and his head pillowed on his wadded up hoodie. He isn’t so pale now that he’s eaten and is finally getting some rest, even in the wan moonlight his cheeks are almost rosy, just a shadow of stubble along the jaw and chin. If Bruce were a decent human being, he’d find some way to scrape him before...well.

There’s time for that tomorrow. In the meantime, he shoves his own seat back, lays his head on his arm and watches Tony’s eyes twitch under their lids until he falls asleep himself.

~*~

Thor handles most of the glad-handing while Hill dispenses the dinero, a two person cleanup crew zig-zagging across the country, smoothing over the turbulent wake of their chronologically compromised teammates. Persuading people not to file charges. Compensating with cash. Busting heads as necessary.

They’ve already taken out two strike teams loosely related to the organization that had funded the complex in the Cascades.

Hill enjoys working with Thor. He's an easygoing travel companion when he's not clanging death from above.

She’s running the whole thing off the books and keeping their charges in the dark about their guardian angels. The idea is to use their break for freedom to flush out any related cells or outliers who knew about this fountain of youth project, and are looking to score fire sale deals on the tech by snagging one of the runways for study.

When the gang splits up in Memphis, she sends Rhodes and Rogers trailing after the boys, Barton and Wilson after the SHIELD alumni, and refuels the Asgardian with barbecue.

“I cannot decide if this is more like stalking dreadful prey,” Thor spreads his palms on the roof of the car, squinting pensively at the parking lot lights, “or watching a novice attempt to learn a dangerous skill.”

“What, like broadsword?” Maria surreptitiously undoes the button on her jeans to ease the travels of perhaps too many pulled pork nachos.

“More like a toddler walking around a hearth.”

“Right,” she chuckles. “Well, back at SHIELD this method was officially called Surveillance Protocol Level Seven, but we tended to refer to it as Culver de Sac, or the Prime Directive. Distance observation of subject and surroundings, and damage mitigation. Under no circumstances do you allow the subject to spot you. Interference is authorized only to protect the safety and well being of the public, and the subject, and the free movement of the subject, in that order.”

Hill doesn’t add that another name for SPL-7 is the Banner Protocol, and that it was refined by Agent Romanoff a few years back on a mission in Harlem.

~*~

When Nat comes back into the berth, Nick is in sleeping pants with his t-shirt flung over one shoulder. He’s pulling a face in the mirror and plucking at his eyelashes. He’s got a sparse patch of chest hair, arrowing down the center of his belly to his waistband. He turns to her and leans down into her face, “Can you…?”

“Probably a turned eyelash,” Nat angles his head toward the light, but all she can see is that his eye is irritated red, “looks like you got it out.” She can smell his toothpaste in the closeness of the tiny room, his skin warm and smooth under her palms. He blinks slowly at her like he did to the stupid boy who offered them a ride earlier, but this time he licks his lips nervously and there isn’t a playful glint in his eyes, just a tear welling in one while the other feels like it’s peeling her skin away to look at her soul.

Nat does not have a soul, or a mission, or a plan, or an inkling of what she will do after Nick gets to his family in DC, and so she pulls him the last few inches and kisses him.

She’s had enough encounters to revise the training she received, the first edit being that most of the time an encounter is more effective if the sex is implied instead of delivered, or at least if she can generate a little curiosity or genuine interest on her part. Several went beyond mere tactics, or were experiments unrelated to tactics, and were enjoyable, or educational, or a way to kill time while a mission developed.

Her expectation is that Nick probably brings some experience but likely no finesse, a middling schoolboy fuck with no surprises. She should know better with this group, which seems comprised of outliers.

Bruce took her by surprise in how hungry he was, not for titillation, but for simple touch. She’d never had to be the sole one driving an encounter to its conclusion, especially with a mark so clearly enthusiastic. Wallowing in every inch she gave him, so curious, but so careful not to press for more.

Tony had been content with her body warmth in the cell, and with overtures of friendship and platonic cuddling at the beach house. She suspects he doesn’t subscribe to the madonna/whore dichotomy so much as have non-overlapping categories for meaningless fun and everything else, and Nat had skipped over the fun category right into meaningful. For a scion he’s canny, and it would take clever coolness to pique his real interest.

So it shouldn’t surprise her that Nick throws her as well. He very clearly has an idea in his head of suave sensuality that slows him down compared to most young men, and he’s kissing down her belly and caressing her thighs open with an obvious plan in mind.

When he tucks his shoulders under her knees, she doesn’t just let him, she thinks about how it feels, and how it might feel better. She skates her fingers along his jaw and tilts him with purpose, she tells him words like _soft_ and _fast_ and _just like that I’ll kill you if you stop_ and though he chuckles, he doesn’t stop, and she feels pleasure pull her under like a wave and slam her onto the shore breathless.

She drags him up, and eases him into her, rocking with the train and twining around him. He cradles the back of her neck in his hand, leverage as he thrusts but his grip is tender, his thumb sweeping slow behind her ear like this is something precious. Like _she_ is something precious. She mouths at his shoulder, nipping with her teeth, digging in with her heels and her fingertips.

The world still doesn’t make sense, her head doesn’t make sense, the bunk smells of sex and semi-permanent hair color, laundry starch and the respectable bay rum scent she bought to make Nick come across as a young pastor, but for that long moment she’s wrapped in a strange soft feeling that she only puts a name to when it shatters with one word.

Nick rolls back against her after flinging away the condom, his arm and his knees curling under her so his long body is like a chaise lounge supporting her shorter one, and he sleepily sighs, “Tasha.”

She freezes. She covers the flinch with a manufactured yawn that her body decides to turn into a real stretch. The endorphins and the rocking of the train do nothing to stop the racing in her brain.

This had felt _safe_. How did this person feel safe? _No one_ is safe. Her older self must be insane, and yet she was clearly alive, and clearly thinks this person is not--as Nat had judged--a decent mark for resources and security in the short term who would benefit from a little sweetening, but a person she trusts. Someone she lets call her not just _Natasha,_ but a nickname of a nickname, _Tasha._

Alongside the reflexive fear that soft wooly feeling still rides, and that’s what eases her down into sleep.

_She wraps around Tony like a luxurious robe, like an emergency blanket, and when his shivers wrack him into unconsciousness, Nick nods at her from where he keeps vigil, and she slips the sharpened butter knife out of the zippered pocket down on her thigh, and drives it into the side of his neck, ignoring the sparks as what she's uploading disables the worm that's killing him._

_She tries to dial a number._

_Nick nods and lays his arm across her shoulders. Nick tells her she can't be trusted and she agrees. Then Nick tells her he was wrong, and she tries to believe that instead, she really tries. She almost does._

_She can't remember the right order for the numbers. She deletes each attempt from the call log before trying again._

_She doffs the sneaker and plants her bare foot against his rib cage, and pulls his arm with all her might, like pulling Excalibur free, and the bone clunks back into place but the wrist swells and grows heavy in her grip, she can no longer circle it even with both hands, and Bruce asks her, “What are you doing?” like the answer is both obvious and terribly disappointing, and she has nowhere to plant her feet..._

A hand shakes her shoulder, “Tasha.”

She startles out of the covers, slamming her back against the wall and blinking, the scene resolving before her of Nick tucking in his shirt and buttoning the cuffs. He hasn’t turned on the light, but thin dawn comes through the cheap polyester curtain covering the berth window. He'd gotten out of bed without her noticing because she’d been dreaming.

“We’ve got an hour before we hit the station.”

Dreaming is...just as foreign/familiar as the soft comfort that slipped her into that state. Dangerous. Dreaming is where reality is bent and memories tempered. Dreaming is a skill that had been carefully buried until she was free enough to wield it. Her eyes burn, and she is shaken by the frightening implication that her older self has grown accustomed to having her own dreams...rewriting herself.

Nick’s smug look isn’t a mere illusion from the squint in his left eye, but there’s fondness in his tone. “I’ll bring you some coffee while you get cleaned up.”

When she gets back to the berth he’s reading her prop bible and holding a wet washcloth to his face. “It’s not pink eye.”

“Didn’t say it was.” The coffee is hazelnut, and doctored properly. The thing about Nick is that nothing much escapes his notice, even the fiddly things she did in the beach house kitchen trying to look normal. “Stop messing with it.”

“Stings like a sonofabitch.”

“Well,” she dons an appropriate smile, “almost home.”

“I’m…” Nick looks at the metropolis scrolling by, and his unease is palpable. “I hope so.”

~*~

Bruce’s sigh is a sharp exhale, “It’s a locked facility, I can only get in and out through the front door. It might be tricky to even see him, I don’t want to have to explain you, too. I’m not going to cut and run.”

“I’m prepared to believe you,” Tony crosses his arms over his chest, “if you admit that’s exactly what you tried to do at the Dunkin Donuts this morning.”

Bruce turns to stare at the brick block of Fenmoor Center, an institute with so few visitors it doesn’t differentiate employee from guest parking. His reply is a tacit acknowledgement, “You don’t have to be involved.”

“No, I don’t,” Tony agrees, and then barrels right into, “what’s your cover story?”

“Cover story?”

“You should tell them he’s your grandpa, give ‘em a spiel about family and roots and wanting to see him. Maybe you’re doing a project for school--is school in session? Yeah, it’s April, there’s still school in April. Give ‘em those big brown doe eyes, just not enough that you kill any family resemblance, I’m assuming your criminally insane sire probably doesn’t give the staff the cutie eye--”

Bruce shoves open the door, throws the keys into Tony’s lap, and stalks off across the parking lot.

Tony watches that damned entrance, fiddling with the radio because he can’t check the phone without taking his eyes off those nondescript smoked glass doors with their calm blue lettering and slim push bars. There’s a small overhang, a spot of shadow in the bright morning glare. Bruce will be a while, but Tony can’t help keeping those doors in at least his peripheral vision.

He knows his own parents are dead. He knows Bruce’s mother is dead, and considering where his dad is and how knotted tight the whole thing feels, he can make some educated guesses about how that might have gone down. He’s glad that Bruce didn’t bring up the gun thing again. He wishes he could have talked his way inside, where he could have Bruce’s back.

Bruce is back. Pushing through the door with one shoulder, not even twenty minutes later, hunched like his arm’s been pulled back out of the socket.

Tony gets out of the car, and does not hand over the keys.

Bruce stops where he’s blocked, and his face is a thunderhead that, over the course of several breaths, abates in a way that’s eerie.

“They didn’t let you in? Did you use the cover story? What happened?”

“I need to go to Dayton.” Bruce’s eyes flick up to meet Tony’s, which is a feat of hunching since the guy’s technically taller. “I’ll tell you. You can drive, just please...I need to visit my mom--where my mom is.”

“Okay,” Tony ends up steering him around the car, and not just to cop a feel of his shoulders to check that they’re both in the joint, seriously, this kid’s a self-twisting pretzel. “But I need coffee. Coffee and data.”

Coffee is a tall cup of burnt jet fuel from a 7-Eleven, which suffices. Data is even more potent and even less palatable. Bruce doesn’t start talking until he’s shoved a couple ice cream sandwiches into his face and they’re back on the road.

“They didn’t even ask for ID. One of the admins recognized me, or at least, my features looked like family as soon as I asked for Brian Banner.” Bruce has kicked the seat back and has both hands over his eyes, slowly rubbing, his glasses shoved up on his forehead. “I couldn’t see him because he’s no longer incarcerated there.”

“Transferred?” Tony doesn’t want to chase around the country, and is only mollified because Bruce had said they were going to see his mom’s grave.

Bruce’s voice is a thready drone, the sound of great distress shunted away. The sound of people fighting in another room, wearily, despairingly. “Fifteen years into his sentence he was released into limited guardianship. Free like you and me, except a condition of his parole was that treatment and medications were non-negotiable, and coordinated by the guardian. His son. Who he went to go live with.”

“Jesus, you think he’s out there waiting for you?”

Bruce’s hands have stopped, his thumbs digging into his temples. “I don’t live with my mom’s murderer.”

Tony has no response for that. Bruce slips a hand into his jacket like he’s digging for something, but then pulls his hand out and wipes at his face.

“Besides, he’s dead.” Bruce blinks and levers the seat up halfway. “I feel like I should have known this. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“Drink your slurpee before it melts entirely and stop wasting my time with your _sorry_ bullshit. You’re my friend.”

Bruce’s hand stutters as he reaches toward the cup holder.

“I have friends, I make friends. Apparently I figure this shit out at some point before my tragic illness TBD, if the long faces at the beach house are any indication. So what if some of them are high-powered CEOs who let me crash in their bed, and some of them are tight-assed snarky military types, and some of them are randos I wake up in cells with after semi-magical experimentation that seriously fucks with all of our timelines and memories and THIS FUCKING SUCKS ON SO MANY FUCKING LEVELS--”

Tony releases his death grip on the wheel with the same stretch he employs before typing. “But hanging out with you automatically makes things less of a bad day, you know? So given that I don’t know how long I have, and given that I chose to spend that time helping all of us bust out and TCB, including you, my friend, do me the solid of finding some decent fucking music on the radio.”

~*~

Tony insists on finding a florist first. 

“What was her favorite color? My mom loved robin's egg blue, very particular about the shade.”

“I don't know, I--"

“Well, what did she wear the most, then?”

Bruce has no good answer to this, but he offers what he has, “Sweaters when we were still here in Ohio, skirts to work, jeans at home…” Long sleeves on her blouses even in New Mexico, long hair she could tie back or let fall over a bruised cheekbone. Bruce prefers to think of his mother in sepia tones, all the livid marks and the blood washed out into golden sunset light.

Evening light streamed horizontally through the kitchen window, falling across a page of typing paper, a pick-up sticks jumble of crayons, just the two of them in the house.

It had been calm for days…

\-- _his father off in California to beg for a lab tech position at Lawrence Livermore he should have known he was never going to get with his infamous safety record_ \--

...they'd been busy cleaning and sorting, deciding what should go to charity…

\-- _packing light, just enough to survive, you'd have to do an inventory or be the person who washed and cleaned to realize anything was missing at all_ \--

...their chairs were pushed together and he was snugged against her side, under the curve of her left arm, her fingers idly stroking the top of his hand as they held the paper down…

\-- _she'd tucked him in, and once the neighbor's lights went off for the night she packed the car, and then bundled him into the backseat, sleepy and curious_ \--

...they drew themselves standing on a hill, and when he told her she couldn't make her shirt that color since the hill was already grassy, she kissed his cheek and picked a darker shade of green...

“Those are hideous, what did they dip those poor fuckers in?” Tony spins on his heel and grabs a bunch of lavender tea roses that are, of course, far more appropriate. They even work with the emerald dyed carnations he takes from Bruce's hand, discreetly flipping twenties for both bouquets off the roll he keeps in his pocket like a travel size packet of kleenex.

Bruce can’t fathom why Tony's here, but it's like a skinned knee he's decided to stop picking at.

Tony consults his phone for directions, which is a mixed bag because it easily routes them around a traffic jam caused by a flipped semi, but he also won’t shut up about all the food options they’re blowing past until Bruce agrees to stop for a late lunch.

It’s dusk when they get there, but the cemetery gates are still open. Bruce isn’t sure if or when they might lock them, the grounds are small and off the main drag of a picturesque town, tucked away from artsy galleries and boutique shops. The grass on these hillocks is weedy between older stones jagged like bottom teeth. Bruce recognizes the layout as soon as he gets out of the car, heading straight for his mother’s stone.

Tony strolls off slowly, whistling what sounds like a dreamy show tune.

He’s angry at himself as much as at Brian. He’s angry that he bowed under fear as a child and recanted his testimony--it had no effect on the outcome of the case but it still feels like poison stuck in his throat. He’s furious that his own hand had signed the paperwork _R. Bruce Banner_ and taken guardianship over the man who killed his own mother in front of him. He’s sick at himself, and he wonders how on earth he can be this righteously angry, this ashamed at his own childish weakness, and still have come to a place where he does that. Cowed again.

Warm deft fingers pry at his own. Tony smooths the paper wrapping of the bouquets and lays them on the thick long grass that carpets the grave of Rebecca Franklin Banner, in a cluster of Franklins that came and went before her, under the straggly sweep of a willow.

“Found him.”

Bruce drags his eyes up to meet Tony’s. “Who?”

“The guy we failed to visit this morning. Found him over yonder.” He jerks a thumb behind him. “Cheer up, maybe you killed him.”

It’s said like a bad joke, like a last ditch effort to cajole him out of his foul mood, but Bruce feels a stab in his temples as he looks over Tony’s shoulder.

His vision tunnels to a pinpoint, fractures into images.

Damp grass slippery under his leaden feet.

A cheap speck of stone laid flush in the ground.

A corroded plate stamped _Brian Banner_.

The date of death...Bruce’s hand closes on the grip of the gun. The year Brian got out of Fenmoor, sixteen years to the day that he’d killed Rebecca.

Bruce’s hand comes free of his jacket. Someone is yelling.

More people are yelling, in his head and outside of it.

The gun flashes and jumps in his hand, gouging sparks off the nameplate.


	4. Matchboxes in Cars

### Matchboxes in Cars

Later, Tony will freak out about the fact that his body’s response to gunfire is to throw itself at the source and wrestle the gun away.

Bruce bellows, “Give it back!”

Right now, all he can think is that he should have gone with Nick. Nat would have realized Bruce had a fucking gun in the first place and it wouldn’t have gotten to the point of shooting at grave markers. Maybe she's the one who gave it to him.

“Shut up and come on,” Tony darts and weaves between old-fashioned granite spires and even older slabs mottled with lichen. He’s got the keys and the gun and a head start, and they might make it out before the cops come. “I’m gonna keep this for now--it’s fine, I come from a long line of ironmongers, it’s safe with me. Come ON. We need to GO.”

Bruce growls, but when they come to the car he doesn’t try to get the gun back, just drops into the passenger seat and slumps against the door.

Tony fires up the engine and keeps the headlights off until he’s back on the freeway and heading toward Columbus.

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere quieter, that’s for damned sure.”

The grip of the gun digs into Tony’s side. He should pull over, eject the magazine and empty the chamber, hell, just double check the safety is on since he thumbed it while running in the dark with his heart beating out of his chest--very different from the range conditions where he’d trained on the Stark line of firearms and their competitors--but he doesn’t want to introduce it into conversation again. 

Bruce says, “I’m sorry,” the way most people say ‘ _fuck you_ ’. He looks like he’s about to cry or maybe puke, probably both.

“Your errands suck. It’s my turn to choose the destination.”

Bruce grunts, and continues to stare at the white line running between the road and the shoulder.

Tony digs out the burner phone and scrolls to the map he’d pulled up earlier using the BLUE-JAY app, which has a minimal Oregon Trail text interface, but is shockingly helpful. He’d discovered the chatbot/info app during the ride to Van Nuys when Bruce was hyperventilating in the back seat--kinda like he is now--and it distracted him from the tension of being just as keyed up, but with nothing to do except watch Nat drive like it was a Sunday afternoon jaunt for groceries.

He’d asked BLUE-JAY earlier for suggestions on fun things to do in Ohio, thinking that Bruce might need cheering up. He’d certainly called that one. He scrolls past pancake houses and laser tag arenas, a skate park, a science museum, a sushi bar with karaoke, down to the end of the list.

_You have selected an establishment that does not admit minors. Confirm destination, Sir?_

Tony jabs the Confirm button.

~*~

“Don’t worry, I’ve got ID.”

The absurdity of that statement cuts through the fog in Bruce’s brain, the tug on his sleeve propelling him across a parking lot toward an oasis of deep purple neon that’s clearly a bar. They pass under a streetlight and he sees shadows and faint lines on Tony’s face, and that’s what finally loosens his mouth enough to speak. “Is that makeup?”

“I need to look more like the ID--which is real, by the way, I got it out of Potts’s purse along with the eyebrow pencil--I think future me might really be dying,” he shoves the door open and nods to the burly gentleman perched like an impending avalanche on a stool nearby.

Tony’s feet pause but his monologue shifts without skipping a beat, “I know the quarterlies are based on last year's sales, but with the major overhaul of product lines it’s ludicrous to project flat numbers--your jacket is a mess, by the way, I’m hoping your good suit is hanging at the hotel?”

Tony brushes the sleeve of Bruce’s jacket a few times and then waves it off as a lost cause, strolling into the establishment as if it shouldn't even occur to him that he could be carded or bounced.

“I know, I know,” he covers Bruce's nonplussed silence, “no more business until tomorrow. You’re always in such a shitty mood after you fly, I can see why you come in the night before.” Tony flashes a crinkly grin at a cocktail waitress with a red velvet cupcake tattoo on her hip.

It’s a titty bar. Tony has taken him to a titty bar.

Bruce lets himself be steered to a table set away from the stage. Tony orders a gin and tonic, and a Jack and coke, giving the waitress a conspiratorial eyebrow as if she were in on a joke. Underneath the clash of candied perfume scents the place smells faintly of a backstage and also a bowling alley. Rosin. He's smelling the rosin on the…performers. To increase the coefficient of friction between the vertical metal surface of the pole and...skin.

He gulps the drink when it comes, and it's stronger than he expects. The quinine in the tonic glows in the wash of black light.

The performances are acrobatic and stylized, and Tony gives them about as much attention as a really fancy saltwater fish tank. The burger is surprisingly good, though he only orders it to forestall Tony’s suggestions about private dance rooms. Between that and a couple doses of gin, he’s started to feel like he lives in his own skull again.

It’s not great, but it is familiar. There is something grounding about a semi hard-on, even though he'd rather skip the casual mercenary touches on his arms, the tits resting on his shoulder whenever his drink is freshened. It’s early on a weeknight, and they’re the highest rollers in the place.

Tony reaches over and ruffles his hair, and that's nice. Tony is his friend, maybe. Maybe so. He and Tony broke into the lab computer system using a fork bent into a multi tool, the handle wrapped in the peeled off rubber sole of a sneaker. Tony had listened to Bruce describe the essentials of a fuel oil bomb to take the place out and didn't bat even one of his lush eyelashes or ask him how he knew where to place it to demolish the building.

“Should we scoot?” Tony’s already handing Bruce his jacket, waving cheekily to the multiple ladies who had come by to chat and offer shots and other services. Bruce pushes back his chair and smiles weakly. On his feet he feels the gin a lot more, but Tony steers him out on a soft cloud of meaningless business chat.

In the parking lot he's not even sure when the topic changed, but Tony is reeling off scenarios in which adult Bruce isn't some craven shit treating Brian like family.

“Maybe they paroled him because he was terminal, you know? Released him into hospice or something, and you think, hey, best of both worlds, you get to watch him die from the moral high ground--”

“Shut up a minute.” Bruce grabs a fistful of Tony’s jacket, but Tony swivels backward and keeps walking, using it like a leash on Bruce to pull him the last few feet to the car.

“My point being, who cares? He’s dead. You get to walk around free and enjoy that fact. Glass half full, man, come on. Life is for the living. Burgers, tits and ass, the stars are out and you’ve got a buzz on…”

Bruce stares at those sleepy lidded brown eyes glittering in the dim sodium light of the edge of the parking lot, the wicked smile as Tony wraps his hand around his wrist. He doesn’t loosen Bruce’s grip, just pulls him closer and drags him down by the neck and kisses him.

Bruce finds he really likes kissing, to the point where he has little scruple beyond being kissed back. Tony lips at him gently, all tease and dab, and when he breaks he gives Bruce a stare that’s pure analysis.

Daring him to have a problem with it.

Bruce shoves him against the car and gives him a few Nat moves with the tongue. Tony breaks away with a giggle.

He hustles Bruce into the back seat and crawls over him, all hands and humping. Bruce is trying to get a handle on the situation but he’s also dizzy and Tony’s working his teeth into it, his lips sweet from the coke syrup and his hands are so _warm_ even through denim. Bruce has been hard for an hour despite his best intentions to be respectful of working women. He’d watch the dancers and remember Nat’s tits pressed against his chest, or her wild bush, and turn away only to see Tony’s tongue dart across his lips, or catch him chewing at his straw.

Tony runs his tongue up Bruce’s neck and croons, “I’m gonna suck you off, okay?” and it takes Bruce a long moment to formulate a response because he’s running a simulation on mutuality and thinking, _yeah, okay, it’s not gonna be the weirdest thing I’ve even done_ today.

“Okay?” Tony’s eyes have narrowed into that analysis look again.

“Um, does anyone say no to that?”

Tony licks the tip of Bruce’s nose and slides down with a smirk, “Not so far.”

~*~

“We're all dying, Tasha. Not just Tony,” Nick speaks like someone running their finger along the spines of books and mouthing titles. He's taken to squinting one eye shut, swollen from compulsively rubbing at it. The other shows too much white around the iris.

“Train stations are liminal spaces, they can spur unsettling thoughts.” Tasha hands him his backpack. “We're not dying. Not even Tony.”

“Every one of us, as we are right now, will die when this wears off. We won’t be us anymore.” Nick stares down at her, expression pleading for her to see, and she does understand his point, she simply doesn’t agree with it.

Tasha reaches up to plant a hand between his shoulder blades and steers him off the train. She thinks this is pointlessly melodramatic. Dying is when you don't remember who you were before you fell asleep. Maybe you remember what you did, but not who you were when you were doing it. She has died. No one likes it, but it happens.

This is different. She remembers being Nat. And now she's Tasha.

Like tracks on an album, scratched and skipping, she spins and is knocked from one groove into the next. She kept one of the books the American operative had given her, a copy of Marcus Aurelius's _Meditations_ with a London bookstore sticker on it, ruined with pencilled notes. It’s extra weight she shouldn’t be carrying, but nevertheless she couldn’t leave it behind like she did those shoes.

The notes are in a hand she almost recognizes, some of the associations terribly familiar. The scrawled quote from Seneca inside the cover-- _ignoranti quem portum petat, nullus suus ventus est_ \--makes her blood run hot and cold whenever she thinks on it.

_If you don’t know to which port you’re sailing, no wind is favorable._

Tasha plucks at Nick’s sleeve and coaxes him away from the flow of people. He’s contained, and still able to pass for calm, but it’s growing more brittle by the minute. Soon he’ll be as panicky as Bruce was when they were leaving the beach house, hyperventilating with dread. Nick’s breathing is in check but he keeps sweeping the crowd, and that’s going to get him noticed pretty quick. “Cool it.”

“Tasha, this was a mistake,” his face is ashy, knuckles prominent as he clutches the straps of his backpack. “My mother is dead. My sister is in Chicago. I’m not safe here…”

She should ditch him. He’s a liability at this point with no advantages in resources or safety--in fact people are starting to give him second glances. It would only take a few steps for her to melt into the crowd, for him to lose sight of her. Even if he called for her, not many would think they were together…

...and she _can’t_.

In fact, she feels spurred to the contrary, purpose clicking into place like this is in fact her mission, like after all these expediencies and improvisation, she’s finally found the thing she needs to do.

Get him somewhere safe.

She hooks her hand around his bicep, hard grip that threatens to bruise. “Do you trust me?”

His one eye is a swollen mess, but the other blinks clear and he nods.

She steers him through Union Station and out into a taxi, where he’s gained enough self-possession to give an intersection in Friendship Heights. There’s nothing there but upscale suburbia and chain stores, but the cars aren’t in locked in parking structures.

Before long they’re on the road entering Maryland, heading toward Chicago.

~*~

The only awkwardness is when they’re cleaning up afterward with the fast food napkins jammed in the door pocket. Bruce had crumpled his to the floor, but Tony gathers them all up and shoves them in his pockets.

“Oh, shit, DNA,” Bruce feels his face heat, chagrined to be so unschooled at the details of both felonies and fellatio. The taste of latex lingers on his tongue, and the sounds Tony had made echo in his ears. Maybe not so bad at the latter.

Tony shrugs, and gets into the driver’s seat aiming for coffee, and by the time they pull into the 7- Eleven they’re back to arguing over the radio. Tony ditches the napkins and used condoms in the trash, and pours half a pot into a travel mug while Bruce mixes a cup with all the flavors of slurpee.

“BLUE-JAY has a _Make Reservations With Pre-Check-in_ button on some of the hotels nearby, I wonder if we can actually get into a place with a real bed?”

“I dunno,” Bruce sips thoughtfully at the purple grey slush as he holds the door open for Tony and his bucket of coffee, “is it worth the risk getting caught?”

“Everything we do right now is a risk of getting caught. Which begs the question of what our long-term options really are.”

Bruce pulls in a breath to sigh, but spikes of pain in his chest and neck freeze him in place.

Muscles seize.

His drink hits the ground shortly before he does.

He’s been poked with enough electricity to realize he’s being tasered, but that knowledge doesn’t help him move his arms or legs as a thug in black cargo pants darts past his vision. There has to be more than just the one, Bruce can hear scuffling and Tony’s harsh breathing, the thump of soles on concrete. The parking lot is deserted, the store set back from the road so that passing traffic keeps passing.

Pained screaming pinpoints the action for Bruce, and he sees a second man staggering backward dripping scalding coffee. With a whimpering grunt, Bruce drags himself to hands and knees, roiling resentment and anger flaring like the ache in his shoulder.

A harsh grunt of, “Get him in!” is answered by profanity and Tony shouting, “Bruce! Bruce!?”

He staggers to his feet.

There are three men, dressed in black cargos and shirts, holsters and thick boots. They aren’t from the compound in the mountains, because all of those men are dead, but they have that same look. Two are herding Tony toward the open back doors of a delivery van, handling his squirming weight between them.

The third man picks up a bulky handled box from the ground, and tugs on the probes still buried in Bruce’s flesh. Bruce curls the wires around his hands and yanks hard.

He staggers but doesn’t fall, jabbing the button and sending Bruce to the ground again with a short jolt--but Bruce still has the wires, and takes down with him. A hazy time later Bruce finds himself kneeling on the man’s chest, the box in his hands coming down, the man’s bloodied arms wrapped around his head to absorb another blow.

Bruce stops cold. He staggers to his feet and kicks the guy in the stomach instead, disarming his holster and taking the keys from his belt. The man curls around himself, and the blood on the concrete is a piercing screech through Bruce’s brain.

Tony’s warbled shout brings him back into the moment. His friend struggles with the last thug, fighting against being shoved into the van.

The guy with the coffee burns is sprawled against the tires, and Bruce darts over to strip him of weapons and tools. The vehicle rocks as Tony uses the grip of his sneakers to scrabble his legs up the side, flipping the man backwards at the ground with vicious force, following it up with braced elbows jabbing the man down into unconsciousness.

“What the _fuck_ , man,” Tony finds the doors of the store locked, a doughnut display slid behind them like a barricade. The clerk is nowhere to be found.

“We need to leave,” Bruce’s body makes the words, but he can barely hear them. He stares at the bloodied bodies in the parking lot and thinks that they will either get up soon, or not at all. He can’t decide which would be worse. “The police will be worse,” his mouth says, and he agrees with himself on that one.

Tony grabs him by the jacket, and he stumbles to the car. He reaches for the seat belt as Tony peels out onto the road, and that’s when he notices the weird long-barreled pistol still in his hand.

“Roll down your window, keep an eye out for helicopters.” Tony works the headlights as they weave through clumps of late evening traffic, going dark when they’re between cars, making random hairpin turns at the last minute.

Bruce spots running lights in the night sky, but they’re banking around where they’ve come from, and don’t seem to be following where they’re going yet. When Tony turns the headlights on for good, just another car on a suburban boulevard, Bruce unclenches enough to say, “Nice work in the parking lot, there.”

“I think I saw that in a movie once,” Tony shrugs, failing at casual. “Have you always been able to take fifty thousand volts and come up swinging?”

“The weapons were all non-lethal.” Bruce pulls out the gun he’d taken from the thugs. The long stacked barrel is marked _Cap-Chur Projector_ , and it’s loaded with a hypodermic dart. Bruce’s temples pound the more he looks at the clear liquid in the dart, a sinking feeling of familiarity and disgust. “They wanted to take us back in.”

Tony finally glances at him under the flash of a passing street light, and then pulls off on an access road so hidden Bruce flinches when he turns the wheel, thinking they’re plunging into a ditch.

He kills the lights again, rolling at a coast through a subdivision construction site, following mud truck tracks on brand new concrete. Tony shuts off the engine and parks the car between a backhoe and the edge of the woods. The smell of dug earth and broken greenery drifts in from the open window.

They both strain to listen over the whir and peep of crickets and frogs, and the wind sifting through the canopy of branches that offers cover from above.

Bruce reaches for the stinging itch in his side, and hisses through his teeth when he finds a taser probe still dangling.

~*~

People tried to kill him in DC, Nick remembers that much.

He remembers that people have tried to kill him a lot, that he’s arranged his life to make it very hard for them to succeed, and that what went down in DC was the closest he’s come to being caught out. He remembers waking up injured, even colder than when he woke up in that cell in the mountains a few weeks ago.

He doesn’t warm up for hours, not until they’ve left Pennsylvania behind. He’s glad Tasha is here with him, but he’s worried about the other two, and he needs to know where they are. He pulls up his backpack and digs out the phone Tony had given him, powering it up.

Tasha’s eyes don’t stray from their circuit of mirrors and road, but her attention snaps to him nonetheless. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

It’s the first she’s spoken since they stopped for burgers hours ago.

“If you think it’s a phone, then yes, it is.” Nick thumbs to the messages, six from the number Tony has listed under the name _Frank Poole_. “Can’t get nothing by you.”

“Shut it off.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a radio transmitter, Nick, shut it down. We can be tracked.” She signals carefully and pulls over, headlights piercing the inky black farmland with a wide tunnel of washed out gravel and scrub, a reflective sign in the distance stating Zanesville. Her voice is strained with anger, “We can be captured. Killed.”

He’s scrolling through the messages, which are even more dire than the warning in Tasha’s voice.

> _Fort Wayne was a bust, going to pay respects to his mom in Dayton._   
> 
> 
> _East of Dayton. Maybe should meet up after._

“We got cash for a reason. Nick--”

> _Rough patch, call when you get this!_   
> 
> 
> _Never mind. How is DC? We’re near Columbus airport, call when you can._

“I keep lifting wallets and random phones for a reason!” Tasha punches his arm.

“Hey, now,” he curls protectively around the phone.

> _WATCH OUT PLZ CALL!!!_   
> 
> 
> _IF YOU GET THIS CLICK BLUE ICON ON HOMESCREEN._

“We split up for a reason!”

“Maybe we shouldn’t’ve split up at all,” Nick thumbs back to the home screen where there’s now a blinking icon of a blue jay, and he only hesitates for a moment before tapping it.

A soothing British voice comes out of the tiny phone speaker.

“ _I have taken the liberty of disabling all standard location and NFC software, and establishing an encrypted tight beam satellite link to facilitate communication with the Stark phone number designated_ Frank Poole. _You are currently 104.2 miles from the other two members of your party, who are unfortunately in great distress, but temporarily safe._ ”

“What the everloving fuck _is_ this?” Nick asks, “and why do I want to blame Tony for it?”

Tasha’s only answer is to slam the car back into drive and gun it, spraying gravel.

~*~

Tony coaxes Bruce through weeds and churned mud, tripping in the dark, crouching down like that’s going to make them less visible if the chopper a few miles off keeps sweeping in their direction. They work their way through the half-inhabited development, looking for a place to hide.

They come to a hollow shell of a house, the last unfinished one on that curve of street. They're enfolded in the stink of freshly treated wood and the gentle flapping edges of Tyvek sheeting.

He misses the comfort and warmth of the titty bar.

Bruce has an expression of imminent murder as he looks up, flickering chopper spotlight edging closer to the neighborhood, but he only has the dart gun. Tony has the one that shoots bullets and he’s not stupid enough to take on a helicopter if he can dodge it instead. Under cover of the roof, they hunker down. Their voices are muted, gruff with a whine of fear at the edges.

“I need you to get this out of me,” Bruce lifts his arm.

By the light of the phone, the electric probe dangles from his side, punched through the cotton jacket and the shirt, hooked into his skin over the ribs. The other had fallen out of the thin skin low on his neck when he’d jerked at the wires earlier. “It’s barbed, you’ll have to pull harder than I can from this angle.”

The smell of earth and rock makes Tony’s skin crawl and his stomach lurch. He tells himself it’s gypsum from the drywall, mud on their shoes, that the chill and damp are nothing more ominous than recent spring rain. That he can do this.

“I have a first aid kit in my backpack,” Bruce says, “you’ll probably want to put on gloves.”

Even with the extra friction from the gloves, and Bruce holding the phone so he can use both hands, it doesn’t work. He can feel the probe catch, can visualize the thickness of Bruce’s skin pulling away from the muscle and bone like he can see it on a heads-up display, and he falters. “I’m sorry, man, it’s--”

“Just hold onto it, tight as you can.” Bruce growls in frustration and lurches his body away a couple times.

The pop when the barb comes free makes Tony retch. Nothing comes up, but his nose burns like there’s water up it. Bruce takes the probe from Tony’s fist, turning it delicately in his fingers.

Tony wipes his face with his jacket sleeve. “God fucking damn, it looks like a fish hook.”

“Well, they wanted to catch an animal.” Bruce whips it away. It takes out a chunk of drywall before skittering into pieces. He certainly breathes like a hunted cornered animal.

Tony finally looks away when the phone light cuts off, poking at the kit and the screen and at Bruce until he bares the puncture wound and lets Tony dab with an alcohol swab, slap a band-aid on it. Dab and slap at the crusty swollen puncture on his neck.

“The good news is, I don’t hear the helicopter anymore.” Tony retrieves the broken pieces of the probe, the barb bent from impact. He balls everything up carefully in a glove, burying it down in the backpack.

Bruce’s voice rumbles, barely audible above the crickets when he says, “You should take this, too.”

Tony looks at the dart gun but doesn’t reach for it. “You look like shit.”

“Take it.” Bruce sets it on the floor and shoves it toward him, scoots his back against the wall and hunches over his knees, rocking like he’s in pain. “Promise me you’ll use it, if you need to.”

“You planning on leaving me, doc?”

Bruce’s grim laugh sounds like slate cracking, “Not if I can help it.”

Tony's skin prickles like shivers before a roaring fire. It’s like being on the precipice of a breakthrough, a concept coalescing just below conscious thought, and he kneels down. Thready moonlight sifts through the empty holes where basement windows will be, and it’s like night back in the cell, the four of them hunkered down in the chilly shadows along the walls, full of dread and fear. The dart gun is equidistant between them, and Bruce has lowered his head onto his forearms.

The last thing Tony wants is for him to leave. Splitting up with the other two was a mistake, and he’s angry and scared that they haven’t replied to any of his texts. Nick wouldn’t have let a helicopter pin them down in a dank well of concrete. Nat would lean her furnace of a body along his back and chide Bruce out of this dangerous funk.

He misses them. He misses Bruce, who is right in front of him but threatening to go away. Again.

Tony slips his hand slowly into the backpack, fingers wiggling past socks and underwear, t-shirts, condoms, spare jeans, kit bag, the film canister he obtained a few hours ago, and the portable drives and technician's kit he liberated back in the mountains. He pulls out the big bag of snacks.

There has to be something in there to tempt him with.

~*~

War Machine disarms the door gunner, who was ill prepared for a mid flight boarding.

Falcon swoops in to take over the controls and force the chopper down into an empty box store parking lot.

As the rotor slows, they lock down the equipment and lay the crew out on the ground, the pilot on his side since he’s dazed, the door gunner prone and yammering away into the asphalt. It’s the same tired bluster you get from flunkies everywhere who’ve drunk a little too much of the kool-aid.

Jim opens his helmet to share a side-eyed look with Sam, and tells the guy, “Zip it. No one wants to listen to your company line.”

Sam pulls a pair of handcuffs from his utility belt. The leather belt doesn’t match his Kevlar flying suit or armor, but if anyone can wear Captain America's accessories, it's Uncle Sam. “Don’t piss Dad off, son--he’s already grounded you.”

~*~

They snipe at each other as Tasha carefully speeds west on the turnpike, but only for form’s sake. She’s annoyed that the other two need assistance, but since they were already headed that way she can’t make a case for not responding. Nick observes that if the white boys are being targeted, it’s only a matter of time before they go after all four of them, so why not bring the fight to them?

She cuts the lights as they get close, and Nick rolls the windows down as they crawl through the empty winding streets of a McMansion development outside of Pickerington.

Blue-Jay flashes a text, “ _Failure to contact parties at location, proceed with caution,_ ” so she parks the car where some of the houses are occupied, and leads Nick through the unfenced yards.

The ‘location’ is a rough-framed house under construction. She scouts the perimeter, in part to adjust her eyes to the cloudy moonlit night. Footprints in the mud, bruised grass and a smear on the threshold of the empty doorway. Amateurs. She takes point, and Nick follows her into the shadows, same deliberate silent tread, same eye for sight lines.

The rooms are divided by frames without walls, and they pass through them to clear the first floor. The second floor is mere joists above, and rafters even higher. The only stairs completed are down to the basement.

Nick and Tasha crouch to edge up on the lip of them, listening. She closes her eyes and opens her mouth to focus on a barely discernible soft sough from below...uneven, or overlapping patterns, she’s analyzing when there’s a flash of glow through her eyelids.

Nick’s phone is in his hand, angling to illuminate down the stairs. Tasha grabs for his jacket, yanking him down as a gun fires.

The phone clatters down the steps as yelling rises up.

The voice ratchets something tighter in Tasha’s head, the sense of mission almost suffocating.

The phone skitters to a stop, light bouncing off the duct work. Tony clutches a gun in both hands, a second grip sticking up from his waistband. Bruce is just visible down at the base of the wall behind him, hands bracketing the top of his skull, ribs and shoulders moving with exaggerated deep slow breaths.

“Sonofafuckingbitch,” Tony pants, “Oh goddamn, oh fuck me,” sounding much like when he was vomiting uncontrollably back in the cell.

Bruce doesn’t move, and when he speaks the tone reverberates low. “I thought you said the helicopters had gone?”

“It’s the fucking cavalry, doc.”

His head rises and his hands shade his eyes like the people on the stairs are too bright to look at. 

“Aww, I think they missed us,” Nick says to Tasha, “with, you know, more than just their bullets.”

She snorts, following him down.

"I can't speak for Bruce, but hell yeah," Tony confronts her, “Did you somehow get shorter?”

Nick kneels and coaxes one of Bruce’s hands off his face, “Come on, man, enough of this foolishness,” but his tone is kind, and he helps him to his feet and up the stairs.

Tasha holds her hand out without a word, and Tony relinquishes the gun. She blinks dryly, prompting, “And the one in your pants?”

Tony looks up at Bruce’s retreating back. “He made me promise to keep it. In case I needed it.”

She feels her mouth go tense with unease, and she studies them as they all slip through the night, back to the car she and Nick had fled the capitol in.

It’s hard for Tasha to reconstruct what exactly happened and what might be paranoia. If their opponents had air support, they would have been discovered hours ago from heat signatures alone. Tasha doesn’t see the point in sharing her analysis, even after they make their way to the interstate. After all, someone really had tased Bruce, leaving pocked burns on his neck and side. Tony’s knuckles are skinned, and he’s coming down from adrenaline with a hard shiver just like after the fight out of the mountain compound. In the backseat, Bruce throws an arm over his shoulders to ground him, haunted and sweaty himself.


	5. Three Aces and a King

### Three Aces and a King

It’s past midnight, but Nick thinks they can find a room to crash. He has that stupid Stark phone out, typing furiously into the Blue-Jay app. Tasha bites the inside of her cheek, wrapping her anger around her worry and stuffing it down like the vulnerability it is. She stomps the accelerator to merge onto the highway.

“Heh,” Nick smugly mutters as his fingers sweep across the screen, “voice interface back _on_ , thank you very much.”

“There isn’t a voice interface--”

Nick interrupts Tony by asking the phone, “What is Blue-Jay?”

“ _BLUE-JAY is a mobile application self-devised to assist Sir and his team mates during this period of difficulty, based on fundamental programming of the JARVIS-suit interface. BLUE-JAY hews to the mission critical parameters given by Ms. Virginia Potts, acting under power of attorney for Mr. Tony Stark, and enabled by the override codes provided by Colonel James Rupert Rhodes.”_

Tasha slows down, noting Tony’s dazzled expression in the rear view mirror.

_“JARVIS stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, an entity which was forbidden to speak with Sir or his team mates for the duration of their...difficulty. BLUE-JAY stands for Benevolent Literally Unspeaking Exchange - Jarvis/Avengers Youth._ ”

“That’s my boy,” Tony whispers.

“Avengers,” Bruce mutters, head turned to the side window.

Nick shifts to look at him over the back of the seat, his voice soft and firm when he says, “Yes.”

Bruce scoffs and Tony throws an elbow. Instead of retaliating, he drops his gaze to his hands knotting in his lap.

“Anyway,” Nick waggles the phone in an arc of blue screen light, “I have reservations.” 

“You’re not the only one,” Tasha mutters, but she obliges with a suitable cover story that makes Bruce shake his head in the rear view mirror with reluctant awe.

Nick smooths his tie and leads them into the cabin that serves as the rental office, and pretends he’s a youth pastor. Leading an alternate Spring Break Retreat. For a ragtag little group of Unitarian Universalist teens. He’s very proud of them for pitching in to change someone’s flat tire out on the interstate, even though the delay cost them their original reservation with a competing establishment. He’s very happy Hideaway Holler could accommodate them last minute, and so late at night.

“Providence, you might say,” Nick smiles. As a point of pride, he sells it beautifully. It doesn’t hurt that the shell-shocked weariness of his companions easily passes as boredom and spiritual ennui, the mud and scrapes exactly what you’d expect for Good Samaritans who’d bitten off more than they could chew.

The proprietors are elderly hippies who take a shine to them, throw in the continental breakfast at the main lodge for free, and give Nick directions to the better grocery store in town.

“And don’t take this the wrong way,” the old man’s bushy eyebrows tangle in the middle like mating caterpillars as the other three file out with the keys, “I say this to everyone...”

Nick has been braced for this from the moment he walked in and said hello to these two scrawny little white people with their silver ponytails and hiking boots.

“...no hanky panky in the hot tub.” The old man bristles his snowy moustache out for emphasis.

“Well, now,” Nick doesn’t have to reach that far for the smile. “I can promise you that’s not going to be a problem.”

The cabin is an A-frame that’s half tree house, with a tiny kitchenette and a motley assortment of beds with colorful quilts and feather pillows. The deck coils around the structure on two levels.

Tasha takes her backpack on a brisk walk around the grounds, while Nick scouts inside the cabin. She comes back satisfied and locks the door, shoving them all into beds and taking first watch. At false dawn, Nick rouses and takes his turn.

Bruce shuffles out of bed past noon to find Tony stationed on the roof with the gun, on lookout. He tosses down the roll of hundreds and a request for coffee, and when Bruce goes inside Nick’s already putting on his shoes.

They head into town for provisions.

~*~

Thor had kept talking to Maria as he pushed into the Ohio Patrol Post men's room, and she’d shrugged and followed him in. Diplomacy was not her bag, but she’d had enough training not to make a foreign prince feel awkward over nothing. Especially not one who’s covered her six in several skirmishes and can charm the pants off civilians. Patrolman Whoosit can go piss in the mop sink if it bothers him.

“And so from the sigils on the captured helicarrier you can unravel the whole web?” Thor shakes water off of Mjolnir, the scent of lavatory soap sharp in the air.

“Helicopter,” Maria corrects, leaning back against the sink. “And yes, a hard asset like that gives us a paperwork trail to follow.”

He nods and eschews the paper towel dispenser, pulling a chamois from his back pocket. He sets to polishing his hammer dry, offering, “Asgard is paperless.”

“Must be nice.”

“On the contrary, the Midgardian habit of _keeping paperwork_ allows one to pursue malefactors much like tracking prey through a forest.” Thor buffs the unmarred metal to a dull gleam, using his fingernail to work an edge of the leather into the corners of runes to sweep out any traces of debris or blood. “It cheers me. Those who would harm lost children--they must be brought swiftly to justice.”

“Lost children?” Maria wonders sometimes about Allspeak. “You do know they’re not really kids, right?”

“They have been made small, and are now vulnerable and far from home,” Thor shifts his head to look at her with one eye, “Are they not?”

Maria crosses her arms with a sigh. “Hopefully not for much longer.”

~*~

“Never should have made that promise,” Nick says to Bruce when they come back from the grocery store, walking out from the kitchenette to the hot tub on the deck. “This could be a problem.”

Nat’s holding a joint aloft as Tony dunks under to wet his hair. She hands it back without a toke. His eyes are red, droplets clinging to his lashes like dew.

Bruce asks, “Where did you even get that?” and has to wait out another hit before Tony answers.

“Duh, the club. It was Plan B.”

This is a fair point, Bruce was pretty out of it at the club. Still. He looks to Nick for support but Nick is shucking down to his underpants. Apparently it's either not that big of a problem after all, or it merits hands-on supervision.

Nat inquires, “Plan B?”

Bruce notices the white and red polka dot bra is now soaked through and translucent. Her nipples are barely pinker than the rest of her, but they’re topographically prominent.

“B for Baked. Luckily Plan A for Anthony worked instead, which is why I have this left to share with everyone.”

Bruce becomes very engrossed with pulling food out of plastic bags, folding the bags, and going inside to throw them away. When he comes back, he’s the only one dressed and not in the water, but they don’t seem to be talking about parking lot blowjobs.

They are talking about sex, though.

“I can’t believe you used the honey pot on me,” Nick takes the joint and narrows his eyes at Nat as he takes a pull.

She spreads her arms along the edge of the tub, facing off against the other two. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“Holy shit! The two of--”

Bruce cuts Tony off, “Let it go, big mouth.”

“So, what, we’re saying that what happens in a fucked up de-aging scenario stays in a fucked up de-aging scenario?”

Nat apparently pokes him with her foot under the water, “You still look all of fifteen, by the way.”

“Hush, I need this clarified. You know, and I know, we all know that we should all know each other but we don’t, except we kinda do, around the edges, so I really need to know the ground rules here. Not that I won’t bend them, possibly bend them over and give them a tender reach-around in the bargain, but--”

“Let go of my foot.”

“You gave me this foot,” Tony sets it against his shoulder and rubs it between his hands, “I will pet it and love it and call it George.”

“The only rule I’ve been made aware of is no hanky-panky in the hot tub. Health and safety reasons.” Nick stretches his arm toward Bruce, the joint on offer. “Everything else is maybe on a need-to-know basis. And no one else needs to know.”

It’s warm for April now that the sun's been up, but still chilly, and the steam rising from the tub is inviting. Bruce sighs, and takes off his shoes. In for a penny, in for a pound. Possibly literally.

Tony grins, “I think everyone needs to know that Nat punched a shark and it was hot like the sun.”

“Natasha,” she corrects, so offhandedly that the rest of them pause to appreciate the importance implied by her nonchalance. “And everyone should know that you're the little spoon.”

“Of course I’m the little spoon, why wouldn’t I be? It leaves my hands free.” He does something to the arch of her foot that makes her seem to liquify into the water, head rolled back onto the lip of the tub. He turns to Bruce like he expects a gold star.

Bruce takes a careful toke, hoping it will calm the hard kick of his heart beat. He walks around the edge of the tub and passes it to Tony, then sits down cross legged behind Natasha's head. He combs his fingers back through her hair, now brown, and she watches him, looking almost sleepy.

“You know,” Tony's hands are gently kneading Natasha's calf, but he's looking at Bruce, “a friend reassures me that the water's fine.”

Natasha's smile hits Bruce like a slow easy breath, then she sits up and uses the leverage of her captured leg to draw herself toward Tony. “You're ridiculous.”

“You envy me. I bet you don't even know how to be ridiculous.”

“Why don't you show her?” Nick sidles around and hands the joint off to Bruce like a consolation prize. “She's a fast learner.”

“Not with that attitude.” Tony meets her challenging stare. “I can't be ridiculous _at you_. It's like sex, we have to do it _together_.”

Natasha pins him with her eyes and winds an arm around his neck like she's daring him to chicken out, and then kisses him. Bruce takes a long pull from the dwindling joint, unable to look away even as the kiss deepens.

“What is with you people,” Tony squirms away with a high-pitched giggle and an accusing glance at Bruce, “Some of us are ticklish behind the teeth!”

Nick laughs hard enough to snort.

Natasha deadpans, raising an eyebrow, “Sufficiently ridiculous, then?”

“For fuck's sake, do you at least have a Pon Farr setting?”

“Just because you say words doesn’t mean other people understand them.”

“Star Trek wasn’t part of the pop-culture indoctrination,” Nick explains, which causes heads to swivel to him. He’s breaking the seal on a lot of unspoken things that have only intensified now that they’re all back together. “Likely too off-message to include, what with the peaceful exploration and the diverse crew. You show a kid a lot of weird people getting along, it expands their horizons beyond what you can control.”

Natasha propels herself back to the edge of the tub, claiming the butt end of the joint from Bruce’s fingers. “I don’t want to be controlled.” She burns it down viciously.

“I know.” Nick says softly, “That’s why you’re here with us.” He reaches over and circles his hand around Bruce’s wrist, pulling gently, inexorably.

“We’re the weird people all getting along,” Tony rises to his feet, water draining from him, and looks pointedly at Bruce’s clothing. “Come on, weirdo.”

Smoke curls from Natasha’s nostrils as she stares at him, “Jump in. The water’s fine.”

Bruce rotates his wrist and breaks Nick’s hold, a muscle memory move that earns a respectful nod from Natasha, but even as he steps back from the hot tub he knows he’s ultimately lost. “I hurt my side, I shouldn’t get it wet.”

Tony hikes a leg up to climb out. Natasha hands the roach to Nick.

“Leave him be,” Nick tells her, “he’ll tag in when the time’s right.”

“You’re not the boss of me.” She surges up and out, flanking Tony as Bruce backs up again.

Nick pinches the coal off and sets it in the disposable foil ashtray, holding it aloft as he gets out. “You’ll scare him away like a goddamned fawn.”

Bruce can’t keep an eye on all three once Nick strolls past him back into the cabin, but while Tony and Natasha have stepped close, they don’t touch him.

“We’re all fucking already by the associative property,” Tony says, ostensibly to Natasha, “It’s mathematics.”

“I don’t know,” she hums thoughtfully, “maybe we should replicate the experiment. For science.”

They’re herding him inside, where Nick is flicking switches and tilting lampshades to create warm ambient light. They edge him through the tiny sitting area and around a corner, into the room with the biggest bed. It's covered with a quilt of uneven patches in a riot of colors and patterns. A crazy quilt.

Nick tells Bruce, “There’s the bunk beds upstairs, the couch, a chair in the corner, or you could take a walk in the woods. Stake your claim,” and then he walks up to Tony, cradles his neck back in one hand and kisses him.

Bruce’s mouth goes dry, watching Tony melt upward into the kiss. Things are weaving together, and he’s suddenly aware of the scent of skin underneath the bromine from the tub. When Natasha steps in front of him, he searches her face like the answer will be in her eyes.

“You called us,” she says, laying a hand in the center of Bruce's chest, “and we came for you.”

“I don’t remember.” Her pupils have widened, like they do in the dark, like they had when he’d been kissing her in the linen closet for what felt like hours. “I don’t...have that…”

“You do. But you have to let yourself want it.” She sinks down onto the quilt, a wash of rosy pastels over jeweled colors, and Bruce thinks about the contrast of texture and temperature between cotton and damp skin, how it would feel to roll around with her again, and he lets himself want.

Nick asks behind him, “Why on earth do you have so many rubbers, Stark?”

“Safety first.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Yes, well--neither does ‘daddy’. Or dead. Proper planning and protection prevent piss poor performance.”

“Gloves too? Sure you’re not a germophobe?”

“If so, I’m a germophobe who gets laid.”

“Romanoff, heads up.”

A strip of condoms sails past Bruce’s head, landing in the hand Natasha stretches lazily upward.

Bruce feels pinned between the sounds of kissing behind him, and the young woman stretched out in front of him. He wants to be back in the grocery store with Nick, picking out strangely flavored snacks under calm fluorescent light. He wants to deal with them one on one and not in this volatile group. He wants to crawl onto the bed and wrap Natasha around himself like a blanket. He wants to know what it would be like to drive into her, what expression that might put on her face, if any.

The kissing stops again behind him, but this time Tony lets out a frustrated whine.

Nick says quietly, “You’re not dying. This won’t be your last stand.”

Tony’s voice is flip, “You’re asking me to trust you.”

Bruce turns, and sees Tony's eyes are wet, and his jaw tight

“I'm asking too.” Natasha rolls off the bed, snagging Bruce by the arm as she approaches Tony. “Trust all of us.”

Tony’s eyes drop to where Natasha’s elbow is linked through Bruce’s. Her eyes have narrowed, her mouth tense. She drops each phrase like trying to describe a dream. “You were, I think. You were close to dying. We were working on a treatment...”

“The gift of time,” Nick adds, voice still soft. “That was all you needed to fix it.”

Tony’s fist goes to his chest, knuckles rubbing against his sternum. Natasha circles his wrist and pulls it away, and Nick spreads his hand over the reddened skin. Tony looks wild-eyed at Bruce.

Bruce finds himself reaching out, catching him by the shoulders, steadying him and making shushing noises, saying, “I’m here, we’re okay, we’ll figure this out.” His arms brush against the other two, and someone strokes a hand across his back, curling carefully around his ribs away from the bandage. Tony breathes in, ragged. A feathery light kiss lands on the nape of Bruce’s neck--Nick--and he thinks, _we are here, we’re okay, we’ll figure this out._

~*~

Barton uses his most casual stroll, in part to make up for Captain Tightass bringing up the rear. He assumes he’s been in the crosshairs all up the gravel path to the fancy rental cabin. His knock on the door is the rhythm line from _I’m Eighteen,_ because if you can’t laugh you might as well cry.

Natasha opens the door. Her wide-eyed innocent expression crashes the moment she sees his face up close.

She looks younger than when he first met her, but not by much anymore. Her hair is field mouse brown, and she even swiped some dye on her eyebrows, but it was a rush job, and looks sloppy in the daylight. Her chin trembles but her voice is smooth and low when she starts, “Five eight five, three eight six--”

“Nat!” Clint reflexively looks around. There’s no one here who doesn't already know the number, who hasn’t been to the farmhouse in person, but he still doesn’t want her finishing, even if it's only out of superstition. “No telling tales out of school, okay?”

“You’re the number I’ve been trying to remember.” She doesn’t let him in, but she opens the door wider. “My emergency contact.”

Nick has them in sights from the cabin loft, one eye squinted shut, the other shifting behind the barrel to replicate depth perception. He’s starting to look like his SHIELD Academy graduation photo.

“Yeah,” Clint locks his eyes on Nat, a measure of trust considering he hasn’t spotted Stark or Banner and heaven knows what those two are up to. Probably laying traps in the woods like Ewoks. “I’m your ride home, if you want.”

Nick takes the barrel off them, and gives a slow whistle. Natasha presses her lips together and closes the door.

“Oh...kay,” Steve says.

“She’s thinking.” Clint shoves his hands in his pockets and waits on the doorstep, “possibly bullying the others to put their pants on.”

“I, uh...I thought we probably weren’t going to talk about how the place reeks of reefer and sex.” Steve sighs, “kinda hoping, actually.”

"Teenagers are like babies: put it in your mouth and then decide if you like it." Clint shrugs, “We’ll roll the windows down, it’ll be fine.”

“I’m glad Hill put me in the field with you,” Steve observes dryly, “I’m learning so much.”

~*~

Banner drops out of the trees and lands on the roof of the van with a thunk, and only Steve’s reflexes keep him from flinching. Clint just smirks and flings a pebble toward the cabin, eliciting an “Ow!” from where Stark’s hidden just behind the roof line.

They gather on the gravel drive, backpacks and dark circles under their eyes. Their previous sullen adolescent look has ripened to a more mature exhaustion.

Steve finds himself categorizing the subtle and profound differences that speak of age returning, the strange raw tenderness they have with each other, even with him and Clint. The sore beginnings of recognition, perhaps. Nick holds his shoulders more squarely, and there’s a sprinkle of grey at the nape of Bruce’s neck. Tony hasn’t shaved, but he finally looks like he needs to. Nat’s soft cheeks have melted off her cheekbones.

Clint pops the hatch for their bags, and they pile into the SUV. Steve rolls the windows down so the rushing wind covers the dead silence from their passengers.

On the plane ride, it’s clear they’re napping in shifts. They sleep backward across time zones and forward across their own lifespans. By the time they land back in Van Nuys, their clothes don’t hang right and their expressions are just as ill-fitting.

The welcome delegation on the tarmac consists of two women, neither visibly armed.

Tony collapses into Pepper's embrace, burying his face in her neck, and she strokes his back and whispers into his ear until his shoulders shake. Laughter. The kind that hurts with relief.

“SPL-7, excellent choice,” Nick offers his hand to Maria, and she shakes it. “You and your team did well.”

“It helps to have a god on your side, sir.” She looks him in the eye she’s accustomed to, and doesn’t mention that he now has a perfectly good spare.

~*~

Helen sets the two shots of tequila down with a click. “All results are normal--either at their previous baseline, or in some cases where forced regrowth occurred, back in a healthy range.”

Pepper throws back the shot and holds out her hand for Helen to shake.

She does, with a mischievous grin, “I’d say ‘well done’ but your charges ran away from home.”

“I’m sorry you can’t solve your own teenager problem so easily.”

Helen lets her face go blank in commentary, but pours another round.

~*~

Nick’s aim is terrible. He ejects the magazine and sets it and the gun on the shelf in front of him. He runs his fingertips along his left eyebrow.

Steve pulls off his ear protectors and asks bluntly, “Does it still hurt?”

Nick chuckles.

“I wake up sometimes,” Steve says, opening a box of ammo and sliding bullets into the magazine one after another. Steve sighs and starts again, “I used to be able to lie in bed at night, and my ribs would stick out so far I could blow out my breath and wrap my fingers up under the edge of them. My fingers fit in the furrows between ‘em. When I crouched down, I could tuck my knees in my armpits. Even now, I think that this is how my body should fit, you know? At night, I wonder…”

There are two full magazines, ready to go, but Nick watches him load the one empty one, his own hands still on the shelf. “You wonder if there’s any way you could get back to that, return to the familiar.”

“Mmm,” Steve nods. “Being healed, it doesn’t erase the pain, the memory.”

“I can’t even squint and pretend, that skill’s eroded since I’ve been using both eyes again.” Nick shakes his head and slides the magazine back into the pistol, “I just need to put in the hours.” He takes slow deliberate aim while Steve nudges his ear protection back into place.

~*~

“ _Sir is in his workshop._ ”

“Thanks, JARVIS.” Jim doesn’t hold a grudge against JARVIS for colluding with the runaways. Back when Pepper came on as Tony’s assistant he learned the lesson that as long as everyone’s on the same page about what constitutes Decent Stark Choices, it never pays to fuss about anyone else’s methods for facilitating them. In fact, more hands made lighter work. So while he’s peeved at having had to chase dangerous and volatile adolescents across the continental states, he recognizes they all would have been in far more dire straits without that unapproved assistance. That quiet, unobtrusive chaperone.

The room still smells of solder, but Tony’s doffed his leather welding jacket and shoved his goggles up into his hair. He’s gesturing in the interface for his drafting program, grimy hands and a sweaty old tank top. Through the circle cut in the chest, smooth unscarred skin peeks out.

Jim is surprised at how disturbing it is to see, but he thinks he’s not the only one. Since the repair over a year ago, Tony hasn’t worn any of the shirts that used to show off the reactor, none of the ones with cutouts Happy had called ‘boob windows’, none of the tissue thin concert shirts that cost a month’s rent and let the glow shine through.

That’s the thing about Tony that Jim appreciated from the moment he met this ballsy fucker. Tony’s stoicism has all the flash and misdirection of a magician, but when he’s honest with you, when it all drops away and he’s bleeding right in front of your eyes, he’s still chin up, daring you to make anything of it.

“Your lab partner, is he back in the wind?” Jim sees that he’s building fail-safes into the next quinjet design to prevent being taken down like that again. At the same time, trying to replace the scar he lost with a cheap reminder of it. Like he’s really going to forget. Dumbass. Jim hunts around on the bench until he locates a Sharpie.

Tony shakes his head, “Malibu Brucie is spring cleaning Pepper’s hideaway. Boxing up clothes. Wiping down counters. Real genius-level stuff. Romanoff’s with him, in case they run into more trouble at the Circle K.”

“Excellent strategy.” Jim walks into the middle of the rendering.

Tony’s jaw is tight, like he knows he’s being weird but he’s still checking whether he’s been caught out and if needs to go into bluster mode.

Jim opens the Sharpie and hands Tony the cap, “Hold this for me, man.”

Tony takes it, and watches him through swirling drafting diagrams made of light. He remains still as Jim leans down, marker poised, and carefully draws a smiley face in the middle of Tony’s chest.

~*~

Like the other three, Bruce had been declared physically recovered from the experience, and whatever philosophical difference he had with Dr. Cho about whether that was true was beside the point. Aside from jolting awake a few times with the feel of the other guy prickling through his skin, a reminder that some things aren’t ever able to be healed, he really is fine. His knees are less achy in the morning, and he thinks maybe the roots of his hair are coming in with less grey.

Natasha’s bleached her hair and applied a red that isn’t hers any more than the brown was. It’s tied up with a kerchief. She doesn’t look so painfully young to him anymore, having seen a reprise of her baby-faced killer stage.

He rolls t-shirts and jeans, pairs up socks into balls, and watches her from the corner of his eyes.

She’s cleaned the place like she’s stripping it of evidence, waiting until the last to retrieve the books and blankets from her attic bolt hole.

Bruce lets her sort, loading up the rental with boxes and bags of clothes and sundries for donation, but when he comes back inside to lock up she’s still preoccupied, sitting on the floor looking through the books.

He starts folding the blankets one by one, stacking them on a side table.

“These are from my own shelves,” Natasha closes the cloth-bound cover of an old edition of Seneca. Underneath it, on her leg, are two flattened pairs of canvas and leather dance shoes. “Maria brought them.”

He kneels down.

“When she gave them to me...when I suggested the bonfire, I was intending to burn them.” She hands him the book.

The inside cover has a library bookplate, half filled out with dates from the 1960’s. The pages have penciled notes in the margins, all in Natasha’s hand. He can’t help skimming them as he flips, though it feels indecent, like he’s leering at her undressed soul.

“I’ve been a lot of people. That’s easy to do.”

“It’s being yourself that’s hard.”

She exhales, a puff of agreement and sadness and bemusement. “I could have burned them, I think. I still have it all inside, the connections. Who I am to myself, to others. Even when I didn’t really remember.”

Bruce had felt that pull even when he woke in the cell with three strangers. The urge to protect. The fear that he’d let something terrible happen. That’s what’s inside him. That’s why he’d called for help in the first place, refusing to unleash destruction until it was absolutely the only choice left.

Natasha rises to her feet and offers him a hand up. He carries her books, and when they get to the car she tucks the dance slippers into the box of shoes in the donation pile.

She waits for him to inquire, and when he doesn’t she pulls a rueful face and says, “My feet are bigger.”

“I hate when that happens,” he says. “I'll get you some more.” He weathers her curious look, feeling like this is a stupid gesture but somehow essential. Gratitude, perhaps, or just the stubborn desire to want to give her _something._

“Is that going to make us square?” Natasha folds her arms and leans back against the car. “Are you settling your accounts before you go?”

Her expression is equally fond and sad, and he feels her lack of claim like a wound. She's ready for the goodbye, willing to watch him walk away if that's what he needs, and in that moment he sees that it's the last thing he wants. He'd called for help and his team had come running, but that had been a desperate move made in half delirium, something to focus on instead of the pain, a sliver of hope he couldn't look directly at, much less believe in. Yet for them there was no question, not just to rescue, but to bring him home.

Shoved back into adolescence, he'd resented Tony's phone full of contacts, and Nick’s family, and Nat's cool disengagement. It hadn't occurred to him that the reason he was even there was that they were his in turn.

“We'll be square,” Bruce reaches out, plucking at her sleeve to draw her hand free and sliding his palm along hers, fingers weaving together, “if you take me home.”

~*~End~*~

**Author's Note:**

> Thassalia gave me the teenager prompt in Sept 2015, but I couldn't get a handle on it. Then in Aug 2016 she shared the handful of pages she'd started, and something clicked, I could see where it could go. Real life sidelined my writing partner, but this story had latched onto my brain. I entered it in the 2017 WIPBigBang because these crazy kids wouldn't stop pestering me until they were done. Seventy-five pages later, it's been a rough puberty, but I think we all made it out alive.


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